The Future of PLC's

[deep6ixed]

I've been in Industry for 10 years now this week, all of them working with PLCs, and since I've started its become almost night and day difference between what we could do.  So where do all of you see the industrial controls going in the next decade?

[BobO]

Pretty simple for us:
1. Continue to enhance the Do-more engine with new instructions, more features, more comm protocols, new language types (SFC, etc)...just more.
2. Pursue performance and capacity improvements as technology gives us options.
3. Put it on more platforms, with initial emphasis on more cost effective platforms, but eventually higher end.

I do not see us chasing every new idea espoused by the control magazines. ADC is very effective at selling to a particular market demographic, and that segment is generally not interested in "trendy"...just practical, reliable, cost effective control. That will be our wheelhouse for the foreseeable future.

[Garyhlucas]

Amen to practical, reliable, and cost effective!

[deep6ixed]

One thing I've seen at other companies (I'm looking at Siemens) is this planned end of life.  We have a 7 year old machine that we have to change out all the remote modules on a rack because the new system that looks almost the same is a tiny bit different and wont work.

[jwbaker3]

Allen Bradley does the same thing. The controllogix 60 series CPU's are gone already and the SLC's are next. Long term support and product availability is one of the things I really like about ADC. You can still get a 305 and the 105 if you need one, most other companies would have stopped making them years ago. If a customer has a old 305 and does not have a copy of the program (with doc's) just transferring the old program to another processor of the same type saves hours of reverse engineering and down time. In the last month we have had 5 job's that we were replacing AB SLC150's, SLC500, and PLC 5's because the hardware is not available any more from AB.

JW

[ATU]

Some obsolescence is unavoidable as some vendors have told me. They just can't get the parts anymore. I am amazed how well AD and Host have provided support and viable replacement options for product lines that are over a decade old.

[BobO]

Some obsolescence is unavoidable as some vendors have told me. They just can't get the parts anymore. I am amazed how well AD and Host have provided support and viable replacement options for product lines that are over a decade old.

Part obsolescence is mandatory. Providing a functional replacement or simple migration path is optional. We try very hard to do so...it's the right thing to do.

Notable exception: WinPLC. Microsoft yanked the required CE license, so that even if we could acquire parts, we couldn't legally sell the product. While it would be possible to port to later versions of WinCE, it would have been essentially a complete redesign for a product that never fulfilled our expectations...due to the PC-based control world being a magazine driven fiction.