Many current IEC programming environments offer everything you would expect from a modern environment: mouse operation, pull-down menus, screen graphics programming, and support for multiple windows, built on hypertext functionality, verification during design.
Technical implications of the IEC 61131-3 standard height, leaving ample space for growth and differentiation. This makes it suitable for developing standards to the next century.
IEC 61131-3 will have a major impact on all industrial control industries. This is clearly not going to limit ourselves to the conventional PLC market. Today, people see it adopted the motion control market, distributed systems and softlogic / PC based control systems, including SCADA packages. And regions are still growing.
Having a standard over such a broad application area, bringing many benefits to the user / programmer. Benefits to adopt these standards vary, depending on area of application. Just to name a few thoughts for the settings:
• Reducing waste of human resources, in training, debugging, maintenance and consulting.
• Create focus on solving problems through high levels of software reusability.
• Reduce misunderstandings and errors.
• Programming techniques that can be used in a broad environment: general industrial control.
• Combining different components from different programs, projects, locations, companies and / or state.