PLC Checker
Challenges in Automation Today
As PLC programs become bigger and more complex, the need to ensure their quality has never been greater. Latent bugs and difficulty in maintaining complex code slow development programs, delay deliveries and increase costs. Also, even when coding rules are defined, there are often no tool to verify the compliance of a program with the rules. As a bottom-line, maintenance costs, supported by industrial end-users, are heavy and unpredictable.
Conventional quality methods for PLC programs are increasingly inadequate. They can’t ensure readability and maintainability at an affordable price. Rules are difficult to formalize and exhaustive compliance is impossible to verify. As a consequence they are considered as poor acceptance criteria.
Today’s PLC programs require new solutions that are capable of automating validation of the compliance with coding rules and thus reducing maintenance costs.
Automating Coding Rules Verification
PLC Checker is the answer to these challenges. It automatically analyses PLC programs and validates exhaustively their compliance with generic industry-wide coding rules and - if needed - rules specific to an industrial sector or a process. It can also generate certified sets of results for external audits.
In contractual relationships, PLC Checker defines the required quality level to be attained and the acceptance tests to be performed by contractors. By using PLC Checker, contractors gain credibility by demonstrating the quality of their programs with the most innovative solutions.
Example of rules file for PLC CheckerArchitecture of the Product Offering
PLC Checker is made of three modules:
PLC Checker Rules Editor is used to create and edit rules files. It’s a free standalone software. Users are guided and can rely on pre-existing standard sets of rules. It is typically used by quality and methods teams. It can also be used by development teams to fine-tune the rules before launching an analysis.
PLC Checker Engine does the actual coding rule verification. In runs on Itris Automation Square servers in a Software as a Service model and thus doesn’t require any capital expenditure nor trigger any maintenance cost. It takes as inputs a PLC program and a rule file and produces as an output an analysis report.
PLC Checker Viewer is used to navigate in reports produced by PLC Checker Engine. It features advanced filtering capabilities to help focus the review on the most relevant classes of errors. As PLC Checker Rules Editor, PLC Checker Viewer is a free standalone application.
Analysis results file produced by PLC CheckerBenefits
Using PLC Checker provides benefits to all actors of the PLC programming industry.
Quality and method teams can more easily formalize rules and thus better communicate with the development teams.
Design and development teams benefit from an easier, exhaustive and automatic verification of the compliance with the requested coding standard. The effort to learn the naming convention is greatly reduced. Also, code checking can be done as soon as possible in the development phase. The testing phase is thus drastically shortened and can be focused on functional issues.
Audit teams have objective criteria for acceptance testing and they can measure the compliance with these criteria quickly and easily with a simple click.
Maintenance teams—who are the ultimate actors in the PLC program life cycle—benefit from a program that is easier to read and maintain. They can thus work far quicker in case of bug or to introduce evolutions.
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Download PLC Checker product datasheet!