Recent developments in industrial control programming

Software plays an ever-increasing role in industrial automation. With this, the associated softwate costs increase, not all of them heing directly visible: the required maintenance over the life cycle, adding new functionalities. coping with new governmental rules, etc. The activities of the vendor and product independent organisation PLCopen focus around IEC 61131-3, the only global standatd for industrial control programming. PLCopen has defined extensions to IEC 61131-3 in order to improve hatdwate independence from software code, as well as reusability of the code and coupling to external software tools. Recent results are a Motion Control Libraty, Safety and XML specifications.