SIEMENS S7-1200--software redundancy

Hi All,

I would like to know if software redundancy is possible to be established in the S7-1200 PLCs. The reason I am asking this is because , the S7-1200 can cover a lot of applications and also comes at an affordable price. But, the manual does not mention anything about the PLC supporting redundancy; also from a few discussions online, i have found out that hardware redundancy is not supported. My question to the experts: Any kind of software redundancy is possible to be established via programming for this PLC?

P.S. I do not have much of a background in PLC programming.Hence the question. If I have made some huge blunder in this question , please point out. I am new in this industry and learning as fast as possible.

Thanks in advance!

This thread will answer your question:
https://support.industry.siemens.com/tf/ww/en/posts/is-redundancy-possible-in-s71200/44941/?page=0&pageSize=10

The answer is no. However there may be some work a rounds.

Regards,
Garry
http://www.accautomation.ca

Thank you for replying to my post and providing the link. I had in-fact visited this link before and am trying to understand the work around. As mentioned by Mr Pegaia in the aforementioned thread "the basis of the software redundancy product is to have the periphery as distributed station (ET200M). The S7-1200 doesn't work (at least yet) with decentral peripherics."
So i am still trying to figure out the way to share the data via TCP to another S7-1200 PLC and advance from there. Any views sir?

I would repost the question there. That thread is over 5 years old and mentions PROFINET is not supported as of yet, right now it seems to be the protocol of choice for the 1200 PLC.

Siemens does not have a supported redundancy solution for the 1200, and I would be surprised if they ever do.

However, you could theoretically make your own, depending on your requirements. If you have two PLCs controlling the same IO, one will take control from the other (after a few seconds) if the first one goes down. You would need to communicate between the PLCs to ensure that the backup knows what is going on. The backup will also have an error light on the whole time it controls no io.

I'm not saying that the above is a good idea, and I definitely don't recommend it, but it might happen to work. I would definitely not attempt any kind of PLC redundancy if you don't have much PLC programming experience. Redundancy is one of the most complicated PLC topics.