T
Hello,
I have used PLCs in the power generation industry. Due to the nature of these systems, a lot of faults happen asynchronously and it is typically unacceptable to shut the site down. For the most part, this leads to "stateless" design patterns. People just make logic in a large and/or/latch mess to handle the ideal sequences and the faults. A lot of this comes from people zeroing in on a specific failure, but it modifies the entire program, typically by accident when the modification is done. I am thinking about a career in a different area that uses PLCs. In automation machinery, is this much more controlled? Can most machines be broken down into a finite state machine for control? Or is PLC programming just sort of always this way? Does the fault handling typically drive the machine to go into an e-stop/fault state?
Thanks,
Tim
I have used PLCs in the power generation industry. Due to the nature of these systems, a lot of faults happen asynchronously and it is typically unacceptable to shut the site down. For the most part, this leads to "stateless" design patterns. People just make logic in a large and/or/latch mess to handle the ideal sequences and the faults. A lot of this comes from people zeroing in on a specific failure, but it modifies the entire program, typically by accident when the modification is done. I am thinking about a career in a different area that uses PLCs. In automation machinery, is this much more controlled? Can most machines be broken down into a finite state machine for control? Or is PLC programming just sort of always this way? Does the fault handling typically drive the machine to go into an e-stop/fault state?
Thanks,
Tim