Apart from the User Guidelines which are part of the suite of PLCopen Motion Control and Safety specifications, PLCopen offers Software and Training Guidelines.
PLCopen does not provide hands-on training courses on IEC 61131-3 due to possible conflicting interests with its members. However, in order to guide potential users to relevant IEC 61131-3 courses, including the concepts and languages, PLCopen with its members defined training guidelines, together with a set of slides.
In addition, PLCopen started a new initiative to define PLCopen Software Construction Guidelines. The goal of this working group is to provide the definition of rules, coding patterns and guidance and how to use them in Industrial Automation focused to the IEC 61131-3 / PLCopen environments.
Within the Software Construction Guidelines initiatiave there are several subgroups all with a different area. Activities include:
- Coding Guidelines (including naming conventions and rules)
- Creating PLCopen compliant Function Blocks
- Structuring with SFC (do’s & don’ts)
- Object Oriented Programming
- Software quality issues and software consistency
The aim is to define a set of rules and to provide PLCopen proposals on how these rules can be used. Nowadays large automation companies have their own rules but many mid-size companies or IEC 61131-3 beginners are very interested in using PLCopen guidelines. Such guidelines will have a great impact in expanding IEC 61131-3 further in the world.
These rules will be very useful to train users and can be a good basis for universities to help them teach IEC 61131-3 programming more efficiently. Read more on PLCopen Software Construction Guidelines
Already in 1997 PLCopen defined Training Guidelines for IEC 61131-3. Read more on Training Guidelines
Also for the PLCopen Motion Control and PLCopen Safety specifications there are user guidelines available on this website.
Other IEC 61131-3 guidelines and training materials (also in Spanish and Portuguese) are available in our Downloads when selecting the category Guidelines.