Recent Standards and IDE's for PLC's

As part of a plant upgrade I have been looking at the subject of cost of
software licensing and methods transferral with respect to our PLC's and
Distributed Embedded Control systems. Not having seen a thread on this topic
here I thought I would throw open a thread to see what others thought of the
topic.

The plant I am working with have various groups who implement plant
processes within their specialisation (a wide variety of technologies here).
My group is removing an old Allen Bradley (PLC5) system and will only need a
small fraction of its functionality to remain. As part of this I started to
look into how we could integrate the development of PLC and Embedded
Controller applications under one system.

We already have one group who use the Eclipse IDE to programme embedded PC's
that perform some data collection tasks and monitoring some of the PLC's
operations. The Eclipse IDE has a range of plug-in's that assist with common
organisation of tasks for these systems, and with the version control,
change tracking and test management. Having seen the possibilities in that
facility I considered that it would be good to incorporate the development
of PLC software into that environment also.

Some research on-line found that the IEC61131 standard didn't go quite far
enough with getting all PLC's at the level of being programmable from the
same tool. The IEC61499 standard has been created to address the issues
surrounding Compliance, compatibility and interoperability and there are
tools that plug into Eclipse that seem to be addressing this aspect.

So, my questions are:- Is anyone out there using Eclipse and the IEC61499
plug-in's to programme PLC's; and what were the good and bad points about
that.

I know that many sites have their preferences for a PLC family but sometimes
the one family fits all approach isn't appropriate. We will always have that
"special" embedded controller in the mix that can do the control and data
acquisition more dependably than could be achieved with a general purpose
PLC (ie: bespoke to the task). Hence the interest in how we improve the
overall management of software on our site despite having different PLC
families programmed by different groups and other odd-ball embedded systems.
As some of our application areas are Safety Critical we need the controlled
approach to software development for these items and would like to spread
the best practices throughout the rest of the site groups. The site is
amenable to using Open Source software products and would likely contribute
to the packages it uses and supports. PLC families on site at present
include Allen Bradley, Schneider, Seimens, Mitsubishi, Omron and maybe a few
others.

Useful comments please.

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