Many industrial applications struggle to bring together information from distributed devices, systems or system components at a central point in order to optimally control or regulate the overall process. A pump storage power plant, for example, should start up when the energy operator needs it. For peak load optimization in production companies, various process parameters need to be balanced and adjusted accordingly. The much-discussed smart grid also requires decentralized information to be collected centrally and used to derive clever control algorithms. The same applies to load management at charging stations for transport companies, for example.

Breaking down old hierarchies

Bernhard Böhrer, CEO Logiccloud © Logiccloud

The main requirement here is to connect the physical level of a system or distributed system parts with a controller. In the past, this was a hardware controller that had to be installed at a specific location. However, these conventional, hierarchical structures no longer meet the requirements that digitalization places on control technology today. Bernhard Böhrer therefore founded Logiccloud three years ago: "Our idea was to bring the PLC itself into the cloud. The idea behind this is to collect distributed process information from the physical level via IoT technologies in the cloud and also control it from there. Artificial intelligence can be used to evaluate this data and derive process optimizations from it, which the digital control system then feeds back to the process. The savings potential would be immense."

The SPS - a service

Moving the control of a system to the cloud is met with skepticism by many automation engineers: necessary cycle times and safety are the main objections. However, many applications do not require short response times and are not safety-critical in the sense that a dangerous part of the system must be switched off quickly and reliably. Böhrer explains the key time data: "We achieve round-trip times of less than 100 ms, with 5G we are at around 10 ms and we can guess what will be possible with 6G. But even now, many projects can already be realized with the virtual PLC." The company currently offers the PLC in three versions: As a cloud solution, an on-premise solution and an edge device solution. All three variants can be programmed in the same way in the Logiccloud portal(Fig. 1). Whenever geographically distributed machines and systems or infrastructures need to be monitored, visualized and controlled, the cloud solution is the most suitable variant.

If you already have experience with PLC programming, you will quickly reach your goal with programming in the online portal. The controller is programmed in accordance with IEC 61131-3 using intuitive tools and AI-supported programming solutions; no special programming software is required. If important process data needs to be stored securely over a specified period of time, for example due to legal requirements or for statistical evaluations, it can be written directly to the Influx time series database. Grafana dashboards can be integrated directly into the visualization for evaluations (Fig. 2). The visualization itself can be created from a variety of widgets using a drag & drop designer with just a few mouse clicks. The widgets can be positioned freely and are not bound to predefined grids. The fact that PLC programs and HMIs can also be tested and simulated directly in the Logiccloud portal also speeds up and improves the programming process.