ITS PLC Professional Edition (Interactive Training System for PLC) is a software designed for PLC training and education. It offers five virtual systems that emulate common industrial plants with real-time realistic 3D graphics, sound and total interactivity. Some of the many advantages of ITS PLC PE is that it's a low cost, space saving and maintenance free solution that does not present any risk of injury to staff or damage to equipments.

How Does It Work

The goal is to make five virtual plants work correctly by using an external (and real) controller. The programming is focused on typical industrial applications of programmable logic controllers (PLC): sorting, batching, palletizing, pick and place and automated storage and retrieval systems. The idea is to let students see a PLC in its typical industrial environment and fully understand and program common control tasks. This is impossible to get if a PLC is simply wired to a few lamps and switches as commonly found in school labs due to cost, space and safety constraints.

Each system is a complete emulation of an industrial system including virtual sensors and actuators. The sensors and actuators data is exchanged between the PLC and the virtual system by a data acquisition board (DAQ) with 32 I/O isolated channels and USB interface.

Figure 1. Data flow between ITS PLC PE and a real PLC.

Systems Available

ITS PLC Professional Edition offers five systems which are organized according to their expected difficulty level: Sorting, Batching, Palletizer, Pick & Place and Automatic Warehouse. Figure 2 shows a view of each.

The goal of the Sorting System is to transport cases from an entry bay to two exit elevators while sorting them by height. The Batching emulates a paint mixing process in order to get a desired color. The Palletizer System challenges the user to group and palletize cases up to three layers. The goal of the Pick & Place is to place parts inside boxes using a three axes incremental manipulator. In the Automatic Warehouse the objective is to transport, store and retrieve boxes from a rack.

Figure 2. Systems available.

Applications

ITS PLC Professional Edition is now being used worldwide, mostly in schools and universities. Yet, a surprising number of industrial enterprises is adopting the product for internal training.

Also, ITS PLC PE is proving to be a valuable training platform on a big variety of automation technologies. Using the PLC as an RTU (Remote Terminal Unit) ITS PLC PE is currently being used in applications such as training of HMI devices (Human Machine Interface), SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), MES (Manufacturing Executing Systems) and ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Systems).

Figure 3. ITS PLC Professional Edition and automation technologies.

Some researchers are finding other interesting usages of ITS PLC PE; for instance, its application in supervisory and fault tolerant control. These are important research areas that benefit a lot from the low cost and risk-free usage of virtual systems. If you are interested in knowing more about real-world applications of ITS PLC PE please visit the Knowledge Base section.

The Product Includes

ITS PLC Professional Edition is an out-of-the box solution. The package includes:

• Software CD
• Advantech USB-4750 DAQ board
• USB cable
• USB license key

PLC Compatibility

ITS PLC PE works with all the major PLC brands: Allen-Bradley, Festo, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Moeller, Omron, Schneider, Siemens, Unitronics and many others.