AB PLC and system Simulation software

Hi Richard,

There is an PLC emulator available from Rockwell. That you can use it as simulator. I don't know whether its available commercially, check Rockwell software site.

It works like a PLC, you can program it - for the list of CPUs available.

Rather, if you can elaborate more on what you want to do exactly, so I can suggest various OPC products (like Matrikon) - which you can use to simulate tags - and similar OPC tools are sometimes available as shareware.

These work good with Cimplicity, iFix, Citect etc.

All the best,
Sachin

I'm not going for anything fancy here, I simply want to duplicate my small plants 20 tank levels, 45 pumps and associated instrumentation in a manner that would allow me to design and test SCADA's (going to use iFix since I am already familiar with it) and PLC ladder logic (SLC 500 platform). For the time being the PLC/SCADA programing will use simple AB bit/word level addressing.

The Rockwell emulator will meet my needs for the PLC and I/O simulation but I would like to check out other less exspensive software options. I work for a small company so funds are tight for toys like this.

Thanks for th input

Ok,

Richard,
if you are targetting to build a demo to show it to your project sponsorers or team, which won't affect your production control, then try using the demo of iFix itself.
For tags simulation - as I suggsted there are emulators from Rockwell (for which you need to pay - and you might not get it without the help of authorized SI of Rockwell)

And other option is free OPC servers / demo OPC servers from Kepware and Matrikon.
You would like KepwareEx - (a 2 hr demo is free for download)
http://www.kepware.com/Products/kepserverex_features.html

You can actually build the simulation on a computer running all these tools.
Well, the same demo of KepwareEx can be connected to your PLCs - to make it a real information demo.

And for Matrikon insite, a very nice tool to acquire, display, and analyze process data from both real-time and historical data sources, check this out:
http://www.matrikon.com/operational-insight

However, this is a small MES product.

HTH,
Sachin

As said by sachin_dm,

Rockwell automation has 3 types of simulators:

1. Emulate5 for PLC5

2. Emulate 500 for SLC500

3. Softlogix5000 for ControlLogix 5000

As far I know, the simulators will work as long as you have RSLinx installed on your computer for communications with the PLC simulator package. I believe that they can be configure to talk to SCADA programs for testing and developement purposes.

THE SYSTEM I AM LOOKING AT IS FROM STRIKER SYTEMS OR STRIKER SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE .