A few years ago, when the "soft PLC" appeared, the industry once thought that industrial PCs would replace PLC. However, today's industrial PCs have not replaced PLCs for two main reasons: one is the cause of system integration; the other is the reason for the software operating system Windows NT. A successful PC-based control system has two points: one is that all work is done by software on one platform; the other is to provide customers with everything they need. It can be foreseen that the competition between industrial PC and PLC will be mainly in high-end applications, and its data is complex and the device integration is high. Industrial PCs cannot compete with low-cost micro PLCs, which is the fastest growing segment of the PLC market. From a development perspective, the future of control systems is likely to exist between industrial PCs and PLCs, and signs of such convergence have emerged. Like PLCs, the industrial PC market has remained stable over the past two years. Industrial PC software is cheaper than PLC. According to estimates by Frost & Sullivan, about $85 million in control software and $100 million in operating systems in the $700 million industrial PC market each year. By doubling in 2007, the industrial PC market has become very impressive. Second, PLC is developing towards miniaturization, networking, PC and openness. For a long time, PLC has always been the main battlefield in the field of industrial control automation, providing a very reliable control solution for a variety of automation control equipment, forming a three-pronged trend with DCS and industrial PC. At the same time, PLC is also suffering from the impact of other technology products, especially the impact of industrial PC. At present, there are about 200 PLC manufacturers in the world, producing more than 300 kinds of products. The domestic PLC market is still dominated by foreign products, such as Siemens, Modicon, AB, OMRON, Mitsubishi, GE products. After years of development, there are about 30 domestic PLC manufacturers, but none of them have formed a large-scale production capacity and brand-name products. It can be said that PLC has not yet formed manufacturing industrialization in China. In terms of PLC application, China is very active, and the application industry is also very wide. Experts estimate that the sales volume of PLC in the domestic market in 2000 was 15 (200,000 sets (including imports accounted for about 90%), about 25 (3.5 billion yuan, annual growth rate of about 12%. It is estimated that the national PLC demand will be in 2005). It reached about 250,000 sets, about 35 (4.5 billion yuan. The PLC market also reflects the state of manufacturing in the world, and it has fallen sharply since 2000. However, according to AutomationResearchCorp's forecast, despite the global economic downturn, the PLC market will recover. It is estimated that the global PLC market will be US$7.6 billion in 2000 and will return to US$7.6 billion by the end of 2005 and continue to grow slightly. Miniaturization, networking, PC and openness are the main directions for the future development of PLC. In the early days of PLC-based automation, PLCs were large and expensive. But in recent years, micro PLCs (less than 32I/O) have appeared, and the price is only a few hundred euros. With the further improvement and development of soft PLC (SoftPLC) control configuration software, the market share of installing soft PLC configuration software and PC-based control will gradually increase. In the past 10 years, especially since the "Ninth Five-Year Plan", China's DCS system has developed rapidly and developed rapidly, and a number of outstanding enterprises have emerged, such as Beijing Helix Company, Shanghai Xinhua Company, Zhejiang University Central Control Company, Zhejiang Weisheng Company, and Aerospace. Measurement and Control Company, Electric Power Research Institute and Beijing Kangtuo Group. The DCS system developed and produced by these enterprises not only has a large increase in the number of varieties, but also the technical level of the products has reached or is close to the international advanced level. In the 4,426 sets of DCS systems applied nationwide in 2001, the domestic DCS system was 1,486 sets, accounting for 35%. In a few short years, the situation of foreign DCS systems in China has no longer appeared. These specialized companies not only occupy a certain market share, but also accumulate the capital and technology of development. At the same time, the price of DCS systems introduced abroad has also dropped significantly, contributing to the automation promotion of China. At the same time, the export of domestic DCS systems is also growing year by year. Previous Next
Currently, one of the biggest developments in the field of process control is the expansion of Ethernet technology, and PLC is no exception. More and more PLC suppliers are now offering Ethernet interfaces. It is believed that PLC will continue to move towards open control systems, especially those based on industrial PCs. The distributed control system DCS (Distributed Control System) was introduced in 1975, and the manufacturers are mainly concentrated in the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries. Since the mid-to-late 70s, China has first introduced foreign DCS from large-scale imported equipment sets. The first batch of imported products such as chemical fiber, ethylene and fertilizer. At that time, DCS of major industries in China (such as electricity, petrochemicals, building materials and metallurgy) were basically imported. At the same time as the introduction, digestion and absorption in the early 1980s, the technical research on the development of localized DCS began.