Object Oriented Industrial Programming (OOIP), Part 1

Your plant or machine is assembled from objects – your control should be, too. New tools deliver the productivity of OOP without the complexity.

Industrial controls software engineering has unique requirements for high reliability and for ease of use by a broad spectrum of users. Those are the reasons why graphical languages have been the mainstay of industrial controls programing and industrial controls engineers tend to wait for the latest trends in computer science mature before adoption (such as symbolic addressing and data structures which both matured for 20 years before entering the industrial controls mainstream).

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) began to be used by computer scientists in the 1990s but has been slow to be adopted into the Industrial Controls world due to its complexity and the lack of a supporting graphical language environment. Fortunately, industrial software vendors are beginning to address those issues and provide many of the benefits of OOP to the controls world without the complexity.

This article will show an example of one of those tools, show how engineers can take advantage of these benefits by mastering a small subset of OOP concepts, and show how programming with objects is a natural and intuitive technique for controlling the object-based physical world.

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Author: Gary L. Pratt

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