cardosocea
Member
Hello,
Late this year I'll be preparing the replacement of old Rockwell PLCs (SLC, Micrologix, one S5 and some compact logix) to Control Logix. A total of about 20 PLCs exist on site. Some are for dedicated machines which I won't want to take on liability and get the manufacturer (if still existing) to take over, there will be about 5 of these in total.
The project started with someone that has left and I took over and their plan was to create a power and optical ring around the entire site and then replace the PLCs in the panel by IO and have the PLCs in a central location talking to the IO over the site's newly laid network.
Although I have no doubt that it would work, it leaves me somewhat concerned as there won't be any "smart" device in the switchrooms should we have a loss of network.
My view is that it would be best to have a dedicated controller per switchroom taking over all the processes in it and replacing the existing controllers by remote IO for a local PLC. Should the main ring fail, the PLC could happily keep the process going and the only thing affected would be the SCADA.
What are your thoughts on this? The site has about 4 batch processes and one continuous process and in total 9 panels where all the network points will lead to were installed.
Late this year I'll be preparing the replacement of old Rockwell PLCs (SLC, Micrologix, one S5 and some compact logix) to Control Logix. A total of about 20 PLCs exist on site. Some are for dedicated machines which I won't want to take on liability and get the manufacturer (if still existing) to take over, there will be about 5 of these in total.
The project started with someone that has left and I took over and their plan was to create a power and optical ring around the entire site and then replace the PLCs in the panel by IO and have the PLCs in a central location talking to the IO over the site's newly laid network.
Although I have no doubt that it would work, it leaves me somewhat concerned as there won't be any "smart" device in the switchrooms should we have a loss of network.
My view is that it would be best to have a dedicated controller per switchroom taking over all the processes in it and replacing the existing controllers by remote IO for a local PLC. Should the main ring fail, the PLC could happily keep the process going and the only thing affected would be the SCADA.
What are your thoughts on this? The site has about 4 batch processes and one continuous process and in total 9 panels where all the network points will lead to were installed.