Assurance and security.
What are your aims?
The first phase of any project is design. clear communication between customer and service delivery are essential, and considering long term goals and scalability are a must for any new poject. We offer software development lifecycle (SDLC) models as a standard part of any new service, which allows firm development of ideas into practical delivery solutions, keeping the customers needs at the center of the project while allowing technical input to be clearly provided.
What is SDLC?
software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the cost-effective and time-efficient process that development teams use to design and build high-quality software systems. The goal of SDLC is to minimize project risks through forward planning so that software meets customer expectations during production and beyond. Usually associated with game or web development, the need for this development tool in automation software has become more and more necessary. Agile methodology, with regular spint targets, are used to ensure conformance to final goals.
Requirement analysis: This phase involves gathering and analyzing the needs and specifications of the system or process that will be controlled by the PLC program. This may include identifying inputs and outputs, sensors and actuators, safety requirements, performance criteria, etc.
Planning: This phase involves defining the scope, budget, timeline and resources for the PLC programming project. This may also include selecting the appropriate PLC hardware and software platform, choosing the best programming language and toolset, etc.
Software design: This phase involves creating a detailed design of the PLC program using various techniques such as flowcharts, pseudocode, state diagrams, etc. This may also involve defining data structures, variables, functions, subroutines
Application Assessment
With the health and safety culture predominant in all manufacturing, the need for a system to be correctly assessed is critical to an effective design. We can offer the HAZOP and FMEA assessments to deliver systems that meet every standard required.
HAZOP stands for Hazard and Operability study, which is a structured and systematic analysis technique for examining a system, with the objective of identifying potential hazards and operability problems. It involves applying guide words (such as no, more, less, etc.) to different parameters (such as flow, temperature, pressure, etc.) of each node (a part of the system) to generate possible deviations from normal operation. The causes, consequences and safeguards of each deviation are then recorded and actions are recommended to eliminate or reduce the risk
FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, which is a technique for failure analysis. It involves identifying mechanical, electrical and software weaknesses and other items that are likely to fail in a system. It then describes the necessary actions to eliminate or prevent the failures. Usually FMEA is a spreadsheet (much like a risk assessment) with fields to describe and analyze the different failure modes such as severity, occurrence probability, detection difficulty.
Knowledge Base and standardisation
The need to plan the methodology used in any program is also essential to any new project. What is the long term plan for support in the production environment? How much support will you budget for? Is remote service required? Will you want to take the finished project and support via other means? i.e. inhouse or contractor. In the event of any of these solutions, a must is conforming to IEC 61131-3, which applies global standards on programs to ensure no hidden, unsupportable code is applied, that a competent programer, can walk up to any program and understand how it is written. The removal of a specific individual to fix something is not future proof or scaleable, and we offer fully documented program implimentation as part of our service.
The adoption of IEC 61131-3 by the industry is driven by the increasing software complexity of control and automation requirements. Labor costs and the time to create and maintain control software have a major impact on control projects which can be improved using the IEC 61131-3 vendor independent programming language standard.