What are the most commonly used PLCs today?

I came into a company that went to market for a machine that has been fully developed in brand A, but because the site is a "Brand R" site, they went ahead and paid an additional 20% for the control system to be "ported" to Rockwell...
This resulted in a heap of **** with bugs and the supplier isn't quite forthcoming because it's a one of a kind. There are two national scale distributors for Brand A less than an hour's drive away...

I laughed a bit when I read this. I guess our individual experience also influence our view on this. Just so I have almost a perfect counter-example.

We have two almost identical project in tens of millions $ range. There's this machine made by an OEM on them. On the first one of these we paid extra for a conversion to AB SLC, but not on the 2nd one because the PM said we got no $. It's not a very complex machine either but got a lot of limit switches. part of the conversion is the SLC code can't be locked. Now a few years later we paid probably over $100k for "service trips" for the OEM to come out to troubleshoot the 2nd machine because we can't really tell where in the sequence it gets stuck at, even though we can do some basic troubleshooting by reading the LED lights. The first one is one of a kind of the OEM, the 2nd one is one of kind for us.

Now I'm close to the point to rip it out and do a black-box reverse-engineering to a compactlogic on it.

For OEM, the role is a bit different than end-user but for some machine that do require frequent troubleshooting the ability to view the program online is invaluable.
 
I laughed a bit when I read this. I guess our individual experience also influence our view on this. Just so I have almost a perfect counter-example.

We have two almost identical project in tens of millions $ range. There's this machine made by an OEM on them. On the first one of these we paid extra for a conversion to AB SLC, but not on the 2nd one because the PM said we got no $. It's not a very complex machine either but got a lot of limit switches. part of the conversion is the SLC code can't be locked. Now a few years later we paid probably over $100k for "service trips" for the OEM to come out to troubleshoot the 2nd machine because we can't really tell where in the sequence it gets stuck at, even though we can do some basic troubleshooting by reading the LED lights. The first one is one of a kind of the OEM, the 2nd one is one of kind for us.

Now I'm close to the point to rip it out and do a black-box reverse-engineering to a compactlogic on it.

For OEM, the role is a bit different than end-user but for some machine that do require frequent troubleshooting the ability to view the program online is invaluable.

I agree that being able to troubleshoot (considering how poor most HMI's and documentation are) is invaluable. Except, in this case, brand A is a common PLC that allows the code to be monitored and changed if needs be.

The other example was a company that bought a drilling machine, but the Specialist at the time was so scared of SBC's running an RTOS (without ever seeing one working) that demanded they put Brand A of PLC's in said machine. The company obliged, but since the Java software isn't quite possible to port to any PLC code, it was re-written in a hurry...
3 years down the line, half of the machine had structural damage... the root cause was that the original controller did position control and smooth the movement instead of banging its 20tons against the structure.

Funnier still was showing said specialist how refined the SBC system was with never ending customisation, configuration, troubleshooting access (it had ad-hoc trending in the controller itself) and the code was downloadable (not modifiable) and you could see it in Notepad or Notepad++... he wasn't happy about missing out on that.

Wouldn't the 100k be more valuable by changing the HMI so that you don't even need to look at the code?

But it's down to experience, I guess.
 
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Sorry for the OT tangent.
We have two almost identical project in tens of millions $ range. There's this machine made by an OEM on them. On the first one of these we paid extra for a conversion to AB SLC, but not on the 2nd one because the PM said we got no $. It's not a very complex machine either but got a lot of limit switches. part of the conversion is the SLC code can't be locked. Now a few years later we paid probably over $100k for "service trips" for the OEM to come out to troubleshoot the 2nd machine because we can't really tell where in the sequence it gets stuck at, even though we can do some basic troubleshooting by reading the LED lights. The first one is one of a kind of the OEM, the 2nd one is one of kind for us.
I dont understand why you have to pay for having a machine show meaningfull diagnostics. It should be in the basic specifications that both parts agree upon when the contract is signed.
It should never be necessary to peek into the PLC code to diagnose a machine, except for when it is a program error, in which case it is also should be covered by the warranty.
 
Sorry for the OT tangent.
I dont understand why you have to pay for having a machine show meaningfull diagnostics. It should be in the basic specifications that both parts agree upon when the contract is signed.
It should never be necessary to peek into the PLC code to diagnose a machine, except for when it is a program error, in which case it is also should be covered by the warranty.
I agree with both on principle, the reality it that sometime it's necessary to get into the programming.

I also agree that especially for an OEM that shouldn't be the case because they turn out one machine after another but again, the ideal just aren't achieved sometime. I guess we can pay them to put in a better HMI but I have no confidence in the OEM at this point as they seem happy to come out.

As for specification. That's another story. BTW. It's very typical for large billion dollar project to not even have a control person at the table during design stage because the "control" stuff is a tiny tiny budget item compared to the civil work. This is not only true for us but some of the huge public transit agency around here.
 
GE and Honeywell are also in the mix.

Here is a list from 2014:
List of Top Most Widely used PLC’s in the Industry.

ABB
Siemens
Rockwell Automation(Allen Bradley)
Mitsubishi
Delta PLC
Panasonic
Schneider Electric
B&R Automation
Bosch(Rexroth)
Hitachi
Keyence
Fuji Electric
GE-Fanuc
Honeywell
Keyence
LG
L & T
Omron
Beckhoff
Unitronics
WAGO
Crouzet
Fatek Automation
Toshiba
Yokogawa
Messung

It will be interesting to see what happens to GE now that their PLC group has been sold to Emerson...
 
Sorry for the OT tangent.
It should never be necessary to peek into the PLC code to diagnose a machine...

I completely agree.

I sat in a Rockwell training course direct from Rockwell where the instructor said essentially the opposite. It's become apparent that half of the business model and marketing scheme of AB is to sell end users licenses/training they shouldn't need and lock the industry into ladder to slow innovation they can't keep up with.
 
I completely agree.

I sat in a Rockwell training course direct from Rockwell where the instructor said essentially the opposite. It's become apparent that half of the business model and marketing scheme of AB is to sell end users licenses/training they shouldn't need and lock the industry into ladder to slow innovation they can't keep up with.


Definitely 'an across the pond thing', when I worked for an OEM, all the machines that went to the states, Buba wanted to know what version is this that and the other.

If it went to Europe (aside Poland) they would be on the phone with "sort your ***** machine out NOW!"

However, in the machines we sent to Poland, they have dismantled it, redesigned it and made it better without a second though and if you popped in when seeing another customer nearby, you got a guided tour, a demo and a damn good evening out with plenty of vodka flowing!
 
I'll ping this a month late.

Rockwell is still king in the USA and Commonwealth countries. To be honest, it surprises me every day that this is the case since just judging based on price, performance, capability, MTTF, innovation, interoperability, and lead-time; Rockwell is garbage. However, once you factor in people with experience working with it, it becomes a self fueling firestorm that's hard to escape. No one ever got fired for specifying Rockwell (this isn't true, I have seen it happen, but the sentiment is true-ish).

Third place is VERY VERY hard to get a handle on because the publicly available market share numbers are all very old, some companies are small fry in PLC but huge in embedded devices in general, some companies are super regional, and some companies are huge in niche industries.


B&R was super fast growing and appeared to be dominating Beckhoff in market share, then 3rd party adoption for EtherCAT went like wildfire (even though it is super similar to SERCOS III which was not picked up much by 3rd party devices). EtherCAT put Beckhoff on the map and I would hazard to guess that they are now growing faster than B&R based on name recognition. ABB acquired B&R recently and will likely transition their machine control stuff over to the B&R family because it is objectively better than ABB's offering. I mention B&R and Beckhoff together because they really are so much alike at the 10,000ft level as far as capability and product selection and probably market share (they're definitely rivals). At the detailed level they diverge a lot. For the record, I think B&R is the better solution and is simply saddled with a generic name with an ampersand in it.

Then you have Bosch-Rexroth, Lenze, Honeywell, Mitsubishi, etc. A bunch of other big old names that are struggling to keep market share against the behemoths of Rockwell and Siemens while staving off the innovative powerhouses of B&R and Beckhoff.

Agreed, especially about the innovative part. We switched to Beckhoff from AB five years ago and haven't looked back. Now when I see or work on an AB controller or any traditional style PLC for that matter, all I see is out-dated, slow, clunky, over-priced stuff.
 

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