Anyone using PCS7 and if so any pointers in getting started

Hello gents,

I've worked with Siemens CPU's for a long time and had the opportunity to play with HMI's on WinCC and TIA Portal and thought how different can PCS7 be??

However, after digging through built systems, documentation and some examples, I simply can't get my head around it. It's a completely different philosophy (there's nothing on OB1, for example), but I struggle a fair bit with the different way of building the HMI compared to WinCC and some of the CFC libraries from Siemens.

Any of you has experience in this that can share some tips, or even some guidance on where to start looking?

The plant I work in, and am the automation engineer of, moved from Moore APACS+ with Process Suite, to PCS7 in 2013. PCS7 is more of a system, than any one thing, and so in our migration to S7-410 controllers, we are somewhere in between. We still have the APACS controllers, with PCS7 OS servers, historian, and WinCC for our HMI's. What ties it all together is a bit of software called DBA, which takes offline configuration files, and produces the tags for the process objects, and handles assignment of process objects to specific graphic pages within WinCC. I took some engineering courses through Siemens to get some basics, but the rest was by digging through DBA to look at the underlying structures of process objects. Mostly that exercise was so I could integrate our A-B Intellicenters into WinCC. I have very limited experience with logic on S7 controllers and our first to migrate in (S7-410), will be in a month.

PCS7 is a really powerful tool. All of the functionalities you get I can't describe here in this thread.

I would say, PCS7 combines the Step7 software options and adds some more to a complete process control system.
There are many, many functions in this system. I'll try to give a quick overview.

CFC is also a Step7 addon. It's a grapical language which compiles to SCL and then down to STL.
You can program FBs or FCs for your own in SCL or STL/ladder, and call these blocks in CFC plans.
For each plan you can define in which interval it should be called. On compile it places the call in the corresponding OB (e.g. OB35 if you place it in a 100ms task).
With special attributes you can define, which variables should be mapped to WinCC. This feature you'll get also when you are using Step7/WinCC with AS-OS engineering.
Also for alarming it's standard to use the alarm function blocks of the CPU, alarm_8p for example, so all alarms are automatically generated in WinCC.
This function you also get with AS/OS engineering.

PCS7 adds a so called technolocical hierarchy. You can compare it to folders in the Windows explorer, where you have to place your CFC plans in.
This hierarchy represents your plant structure, based on the technological view, and not based on PLCs.
So if you have some kind of reactor in your plant, PLC1 has one pump, PLC2 another and so on, you can put all CFC plans which have something to do with this reactor in one folder.

And also this hierarchy defines the menu structure inside WinCC. So you have the same technological hierarchie in your program and inside WinCC. If you see any error message inside WinCC, you know directly in which part of the program you have to search for the problem. Even if you haven't programmed this system.

The next thing is, that you can define faceplates inside WinCC, which are automatically generated if you place a function block for a pump, valve or anything else you can imagine.

Example workflow:
You have a technological hierarchie of
- Reactor 1
- Reactor 2

In reactor 1 you have a pump and a flow measurement.
You add a CFC plan for your pump and a CFC plan for your measure inside "Reactor 1" folder.
PCS7 comes with a library of objects (APL library) you can use, but you can create your own (which is a lot of work if you want to use all features).

For the pump you put the MotL block from the library into the plan, for the flow measurement you can use the MonAnL block.
When you then do a full compile, you get in WinCC for these two objects:
- variables, alarms, taglogging are generated
- A faceplate instance is placed in the corresponding WinCC picture

If you delete or rename the pump object, it's all synced with WinCC.

This are just the basic features.

In my opinion, with this system you can handle really big plants with many CPUs and thousands of signals.

Hi cardosocea!


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Kalle

Hello,

Thanks for the replies.
I see now that the system is powerful, but a bit boring as one can "just" add blocks and everything gets imported directly to the HMI, although the resulting code is quite bloated... which must be a really good way of selling additional CPUs.

I went through the "Getting Started" color_gs example today and feel a bit more at ease with it. At the end of the day, what I think I need is really going through the APL as that is what is hidden inside the blocks and will definitely assist in understanding some of the older code we have.

Thanks Kalle... the APL reference guide is 2000 pages. I guess I won't be spending money in books in 2017.