Time is money, and for industrial automation software development, nothing saves more time than the ability to reuse programming code. Until now, the norm in automation has been custom and proprietary ...

Since the mid 1990s, substantial efforts have been made to standardize programming in all areas of industrial control. The increasing abundance of low-cost programmable logic controllers or PLCs has ...

A family of programming languages for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Of the three graphical and two textual languages, ladder logic (see example below) was the first language and widely used.

Old habits die hard. But change is inevitable. And in this case, if proponents are right, change is on the way in the form of an open PLC programming standard known as IEC 61131-3. Promulgated by the ...