Itris Automation at SPS IPC Drives Nuremberg 2016

Itris Automation is an active member of the PLCopen association and they contributed to the creation of the association's coding guidelines as part of the working group. The working group was made up of several members from different companies and industries, and during the 3-year creation period, this group got together for a number of face-to-face and web meetings to discuss and write the guidelines. The first official version of the PLCopen coding guidelines was published on 20th April 2016. However, Itris Automation have not stopped there with this project, as they are now working on integrating the guidelines into their program, PLC Checker.

PLC Checker is Itris Automation's flagship product, and it will be their focus at this year's SPS IPC Drives. PLC Checker is a quality assessment tool which automatically analyses PLC programs and verifies their compliance against a chosen set of rules. The application performs a static analysis of a PLC program and produces visual and detailed results which show the user how compliant their program is with the chosen rules and where the issues are, whether during the development or maintenance of the program. The main goal of PLC Checker is to ensure good programming practices are being followed which leads to savings of time and money for the customer, especially during maintenance.

Currently, Itris Automation are working on integrating the PLCopen coding guidelines into PLC Checker. This will allow users to automatically verify the compliance of their program with the first reference standard for the PLC industry. This integration process requires a lot of work, from the translation of each rule - some of which are more complicated to automate and therefore take longer to interpret than others - to integrating each rule independently and testing it on several different codes to ensure it works correctly. Itris Automation decided to integrate the PLCopen coding guidelines into their program PLC Checker as they feel that the guidelines offer a full set of good practice programming rules for any industry. The ideas came from a mix of people from different companies and industries who use diverse coding styles and languages, therefore the set of rules is comprehensive and a good starting point for any company.

Itris Automation is a software engineering company that provides development tools for the verification, conversion and documentation of PLC codes to complement the programming tools of international PLC vendors. Due to its advanced technologies, Itris Automation supports its clients, whether project managers, developers, quality managers or industry experts, in improving their development processes and therefore in delivering higher quality programs in shorter timeframes. With a team that is known for its vast experience and expertise in computer science and automation, Itris Automation's aim is to provide innovative software to optimise their clients' development processes.

To develop its technology and its products, Itris Automation works in close collaboration with all sector representatives: the certification companies (for example Det Norske Veritas), the PLC vendors (Schneider, CoDeSys, Siemens, Phoenix Contact") and various associations (PLC Open, Club Automation, Control System Integrator Association, ISPE).

Itris Automation can organise calls, demos and meetings for the weeks before or during SPS IPC Drives for all those who want to discover this company and its products in more detail. For more information or for booking a meeting, please contact [email protected], or go to www.itris-automation.com.