Part 2 History of PLC

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC), a computing device invented by Richard E. Morley in 1968, have been widely used in industry including manufacturing systems, transportation systems, chemical process facilities, and many others. At that time, the PLC replaced the hardwired logic with soft-wired logic or so-called relay ladder logic (RLL), a programming language visually resembling the hardwired logic, and reduced thereby the configuration time from 6 months down to 6 days [Moody and Morley, 1999]. Although PC based control has started to come into place, PLC based control will remain the technique to which the majority of industrial applications will adhere due to its higher performance, lower price, and superior reliability in harsh environments. Moreover, according to a study on the PLC market of Frost and Sullivan [1995], an increase of the annual sales volume to 15 million PLCs per year with the hardware value of more than 8 billion US dollars has been predicted, though the prices of computing hardware is steadily dropping. The inventor of the PLC, Richard E Morley, fairly considers the PLC market as a 5-billion industry at the present time.

Though PLCs are widely used in industrial practice, the programming of PLC based control systems is still very much relying on trial-and-error. Alike software engineering, PLC software design is facing the software dilemma or crisis in a similar way. Morley himself emphasized this aspect most forcefully by indicating

`If houses were built like software projects, a single woodpecker could destroy civilization.”

Particularly, practical problems in PLC programming are to eliminate software bugs and to reduce the maintenance costs of old ladder logic programs. Though the hardware costs of PLCs are dropping continuously, reducing the scan time of the ladder logic is still an issue in industry so that low-cost PLCs can be used.

In general, the productivity in generating PLC is far behind compared to other domains, for instance, VLSI design, where efficient computer aided design tools are in practice. Existent software engineering methodologies are not necessarily applicable to the PLC based software design because PLC-programming requires a simultaneous consideration of hardware and software. The software design becomes, thereby, more and more the major cost driver. In many industrial design projects, more than of the manpower allocated for the control system design and installation is scheduled for testing