Allen-bradley Company, LLC

John J Hodorowski

Donald S Pieronek

A program for partitioning a centrally developed industrial control program into component that may be download to distributed devices for execution and control of an industrial process divides elements of the control program into spatially linked elements which are associated with physical devices that have defined locations and spatially independent elements that have no defined location within the control structure. The spatially linked elements are grouped together according to their proximity and the spatially independent elements are assigned to those groupings so as to minimize communications between the various links. The cost of the grouping, the band width of the signals and the capabilities of the modules are also considered.

Partitioning program for highly distributed control system to reduce

A highly distributed industrial control system employs a number of separate control modules communicating together on a shared communications medium. Each module emulates one or more basic electrical parts having electrical terminals, such as switches and relays, and transmits production messages indicating the state of the parts, such as conducting current or not. A connection list for each part in each control module defines message identifiers of other parts whose production messages are received by the control module and interpreted as current flow to one or more of its parts. The control system is programmed by generating a schematic on a programming terminal showing connections of terminals on symbols of the parts such as would represent actual wiring of the emulated parts. A parts layout diagram is used in conjunction with the schematic to identify each part to a physical module. In this way the program is divided to run concurrently on the various modules without explicit instructions by the programmer.

Method of programming industrial controllers with highly distributed

A highly distributed industrial control system employs a number of separate control modules communicating together on a shared communications medium. Each module emulates one or more basic electrical parts having electrical terminals, such as switches and relays, and transmits production messages indicating the state of the parts, such as conducting current or not. A connection list for each part in each control module defines message identifiers of other parts whose production messages are received by the control module and interpreted as current flow to one or more of its parts. The control system is programmed by generating a schematic on a programming terminal showing connections of terminals on symbols of the parts such as would represent actual wiring of the emulated parts. This schematic is analyzed to determine the immediate upstream neighbors of each part and the message identifiers of those parts in the control modules form the connection lists. In this way the program is divided to run concurrently on the various modules.

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Milwaukee County, WI, United States of America

John J Hodorowski