The creation and continued recent enhancements of a unique solution – the ‘Totally Integrated Automation Portal’ (TIA Portal) from Siemens Industry – has seen a step change in providing manufacturers with the means to harness the power of a seamless approach to engineering, maintenance and commissioning tasks, all within a single engineering framework. As well as offering time and cost saving benefits with estimates of a 30% saving in engineering time, it also lays the foundations for a future scalable answer to the increasingly complex demands automation components are expected to meet.
Simon Keogh from Siemens Industry outlines the thinking behind the TIA Portal and highlights recent enhancements for TIA V12 that help illustrate why it is the way forward for manufacturers tackling current and future industrial challenges.
Manufacturers across all sectors face a number of challenges and market drivers. If companies are to maintain a competitive advantage in a global manufacturing environment, issues such as optimising productivity, reducing time to market and creating more flexible production options are of central concern to manufacturers, particularly across the food and beverage, automotive, chemical and pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors. It is widely acknowledged that the manufacturing efficiencies and flexibility benefits delivered by investment in automation engineering can help address some of these key issues.
A major consideration is the increasing demand for the continual innovation of products with shorter product lifecycles – the automotive industry is a prime example. This creates great pressures on the ability of manufacturers to achieve both flexible production schedules, as well as deliver products to market in ever shorter timescales.
Recognising these trends, Siemens embarked upon the development of the Totally Integrated Automation (TIA) Portal. With automation systems leading the way in terms of generating production efficiencies, the portal is an ‘industry-first’ software engineering framework that allows users – via integrated software tools – to complete the journey from product design and development through production planning, engineering and operational stages, all within a single engineering environment.
The portal’s development in conjunction with new automation controller platforms has been based upon the close study of typical engineering applications, as well as analysing and evaluating customer requirements across sectors and industries ranging from OEMs, system integrators and manufacturers.
By implementing the integrated engineering tools accessible through the portal, deliverable benefits such as higher plant availability, investment protection, quick start-up, efficient engineering and much shorter engineering development cycles are now possible.
From the drawing board to the marketplace
A major problem traditionally facing automation control engineers has been the limitations caused by utilising separate software packages because they lack consistency and integration. The TIA Portal solution tackles this fundamental issue by providing easy access to a centralised software engineering framework as a common user interface for all automation tasks. In this respect, the TIA Portal delivers a common engineering environment for PLC, HMI, SCADA and drives technology.
At the heart of the portal lies the ability to develop and commission automation systems quickly and intuitively, reducing the traditional time consuming and costly integration of separate software packages, and speeding up the time needed to get products from the drawing board to the marketplace.
The framework provides advanced shared services across all the configuration interfaces ensuring uniform navigation for the user and a consistent system ‘look and feel’.
As an example, all devices and networks in any automation system can be configured within one shared device and network editor. Project navigation, library concepts, data management, project storage, diagnostics and online functions are standard features and made available to the user in the shared TIA Portal framework. This unified software development environment offers a high level of efficiency across the overall automation project and is currently comprised of programmable controllers, HMI devices and drives. This will be expanded to cover the entire Totally Integrated Automation offering from Siemens Industry.
Performance plus efficiency
Siemens Industry has recently extended the TIA Portal engineering framework with the addition of a number of new functions, providing increased performance, security and efficiency to the existing framework’s capabilities.
The TIA Portal now enables all drives of the Sinamics G converter series from Siemens to be integrated into the TIA Portal. In addition, it now includes the new Simatic S7-1500 PLC which delivers even greater performance, diagnostics and security.
Intelligent answers for complex automation demands
The Siemens TIA Portal enables users to perform complex automation and drive tasks quickly and intuitively. Commissioning time is reduced and maintenance strategies supported which reduces downtime and improves operational efficiencies.
The recent enhancements seen in TIA Portal V12 are the next stage in the on-going development of an innovative and intelligence-led engineering framework, helping the manufacturing community perform as efficiently as possible and assisting them in meeting the manufacturing challenges of the future.
