PLC coding guidelines released

PLCopen has released coding guidelines designed to help provide industrial control programming solutions for programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and was created by members from different companies as well as educational institutions.

By PLCopen October 9, 2016

PLCopen has released coding guidelines designed to help provide industrial control programming solutions for programmable logic controllers (PLCs). The group collaborated with members from a number of companies in different industries to create these coding guidelines as well as educational institutions. These guidelines were inspired by some pre-existing standards from other domains such as IEC 61131-3, JSF++ coding standard and MISRA-C.

PLCopen’s reference standard can be used for testing the quality of all PLC codes, independent of brand and industry.PLCopen’s coding guidelines are made up of 64 rules, which cover the naming, comments, and structure of the code for greater developer consistency. This is intended to result in greater efficiency as better readability means a faster debug time, and a program that is easier to maintain. This then results in lower costs as less time is required in order to maintain the program. PLCopen’s coding guidelines are designed to be used across all industries to greatly improve the quality of the code and, as a result, to help companies save time and money.

Consistency across PLC programs can only be achieved through the respect of a global corporate or industrial standard, with PLCopen now being the de facto standard in the automation industry. With quality playing a greater role in industry and with companies always looking for cost saving methods, the answer is to use some sort of standard or set of rules in order to meet these goals. The standard is also designed to allow companies to enforce their quality requirements on suppliers, software contractors, and system integrators.

PLCopen

www.plcopen.org 

– Edited from a PLCopen press release by CFE Media. See more Control Engineering PLC and PAC stories.

The PLCopen coding guidelines v1.0 can be downloaded for free on the PLCopen website