Under the name 'AXC F 2152', the Blomberg-based company is presenting the first industrial controller based on PLCnext technology at the trade fair: The controller family starts with a dual-core hardware architecture with 512 MByte memory and 800 MHz system clock and initially serves primarily the market for decentralized, modular small controllers. According to Ulrich Leidecker, Managing Director of Industrial Management & Automation at Phoenix Contact, the first controllers in the high-end series and the integration of safety technology will follow in 2018.

What is special about PLCnext? First of all, the controller is based on an embedded Linux architecture that has been expanded to include real-time capability. However, the core of the technology is located one level higher in the system architecture. Until now, control programming - assuming determinism as the basis - was only possible using defined PLC programming languages. By providing an open platform on which several developers from different generations and programming disciplines or domains can work on a control program in parallel, Leidecker says that engineering is simplified considerably.

The different program sequences do not have to be integrated into an IEC 61131 task, as was previously the case, so that they run deterministically. Instead, the patent-pending Execution Synchronization Manager (ESM) allows programs from different development environments to be combined with each other and within tasks, but behave like a homogeneous IEC 61131 code. This would also make high-level language programs automatically deterministic. The second technological aspect is the consistency of the data in the process image, which PLCnext's "Global Data Space" (GDS), for which a patent application has also been filed, provides. Using sophisticated mechanisms with internal port and data buffer structures, the GDS ensures that the individual program elements receive exactly the consistent data image that is absolutely necessary for successful program execution.

In addition to the core elements ESM and GDS, an OPC UA server is implemented in the controller as well as a system, user and fieldbus manager, diagnostic logger, trace controller, PC Worx-Engineer HMI and automatic access to the Proficloud, which is free of charge for the first year.