Feature PLCs & Industrial PCs Performance plus efficiency
The creation and enhancements of the ‘Totally Integrated Automation Portal’ (TIA Portal) from Siemens Industry has seen a step change in enabling manufacturers to harness the power of a seamless approach to engineering, maintenance and commissioning tasks - all within a single engineering framework. Simon Keogh from Siemens Industry explains the thinking behind the TIA Portal and highlights recent enhancements
s well as offering time and cost saving benefits with estimates of a 30% saving in engineering time, TIA also lays the foundations for a future scalable answer to the increas- ingly complex demands automation components are expected to meet. Manufacturers across all sectors face a number of challenges and market drivers. If companies are to maintain a competitive advantage in a global manufacturing environment, issues such as optimising productivity,
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reducing time to market and creating more flexible production options are of central concern to manufacturers, particularly across the food and bever- age, automotive, chemical and phar- maceutical and life sciences sectors. It is widely acknowledged that the man- ufacturing efficiencies and flexibility benefits delivered by investment in automation engineering can help address some of these key issues. A major consideration is the increasing demand for the continual innovation of products with shorter product lifecycles - the automotive industry is a prime example. This cre- ates great pressures on the ability of manufacturers to achieve both flexible production schedules, as well as deliver products to market in ever shorter timescales.
Recognising these trends, Siemens embarked upon the development of the Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) Portal. With automation systems lead- ing the way in terms of generating pro- duction efficiencies, the portal is a software engineering framework that allows users - via integrated software
PLCs & Industrial PCs NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
Above: recent enhancements to TIA V12 show the way forward for manufacturers tackling current and future industrial challenges
tools - to complete the journey from product design and development through production planning, engineer- ing and operational stages, all within a single engineering environment. The portal’s development in conjunc- tion with new automation controller platforms has been based upon the close study of typical engineering applica- tions, as well as analysing and evaluating customer requirements across sectors and industries ranging from OEMs, system integrators and manufacturers. By implementing the integrated engi- neering tools accessible through the portal, deliverable benefits such as higher plant availability, investment protection, quick start-up, efficient engi- neering and much shorter engineering development cycles are now possible.
Drawing board to marketplace A major problem traditionally facing automation control engineers has been the limitations caused by utilising sepa- rate software packages because they lack consistency and integration. The TIA Portal solution tackles this funda- mental issue by providing easy access to a centralised software engineering framework as a common user interface for all automation tasks. In this respect, the TIA Portal delivers a common engi- neering environment for PLC, HMI, SCADA and drives technology. At the heart of the portal lies the abil- ity to develop and commission automa- tion systems quickly and intuitively, reducing the traditional time consum- ing and costly integration of separate software packages, and speeding up the time needed to get products from the
drawing board to the marketplace. The framework provides advanced shared services across all the configu- ration interfaces ensuring uniform navigation for the user and a consis- tent system ‘look and feel’.
As an example, all devices and net- works in any automation system can be configured within one shared device and network editor. Project navigation, library concepts, data management, project storage, diagnos- tics and online functions are standard features and made available to the user in the shared TIA Portal framework. This unified software development environment offers a high level of effi- ciency across the overall automation project and is currently comprised of programmable controllers, HMI devices and drives. This will be expanded to cover the entire Totally Integrated Automation offering from Siemens Industry.
Performance plus efficiency Siemens Industry has recently extended the TIA Portal engineering framework with the addition of a number of new functions, providing increased perfor- mance, security and efficiency to the existing framework’s capabilities. The TIA Portal now enables all drives of the Sinamics G converter series from Siemens to be integrated into the TIA Portal. In addition, it now includes the new Simatic S7-1500 PLC which delivers greater performance, diagnostics and security.
The Siemens TIA Portal enables users to perform complex automation and drive tasks quickly and intu- itively. Commissioning time is reduced and maintenance strategies supported which reduces down-time and improves operational efficiencies. The recent enhancements seen in TIA Portal V12 are the next stage in the ongoing development of an intelli- gence led engineering framework, helping the manufacturing community perform as efficiently as possible and assisting them in meeting the manu- facturing challenges of the future.
Siemens Industry
www.siemens.com T: 07808 823 011
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