This ICALEPCS 2025 conference workshop intends to create a collaborative space where attendees will show and exchange their best practices, tools employed and return of experience when engineering PLC based control systems. Discussions will focus on:
- Specification and design methodologies for control applications.
- Software development under industry standards and frameworks.
- Capabilities of PLC suppliers' IDEs, including advanced software engineering features.
- Emerging paradigms, such as automatic code generation and object-oriented approaches.
- New technology trends, including embedded OPC-UA, MQTT, and modern communication protocols.
- Best practices for programming languages and coding conventions in PLC environments.
- Application lifecycle management, including source control and deployment strategies.
- Testing and verification methodologies, covering FAT, SAT, virtual commissioning, and formal methods.
- Strategies for upgrading and reengineering existing applications to enhance performance and maintainability.
- Comprehensive documentation approaches to ensure knowledge transfer and compliance.
Challenges
- PLC based applications life spans for more than 15 years in most of the cases. Maintenance and handling of those applications is a complex task, as usually the applications do not follow any structure but the automation engineer own implementation. Is standardization a real need? Do the control frameworks give any help on this?
- Testing industrial applications is a time consuming task together with an incomplete exercise. Compromises must be found to the test coverage (e.g. difficult offline tests). Verification is emerging as alternative action. What is the best method to test an application?
- Deploying applications must be tracked and the software components deployed must be easily traceable. In case of an issue in a delivered component in a project, a efficient identification of the affected PLCs should be straight forward. Are you in measure to identify this effectively?
- Handling cents of applications becomes a difficult task. Online modifications are required along the life of control systems and the management of such changes must be addressed. How engineers handle the follow up of changes with respect to initial specifications? How a standby service could know the right application to download to a PLC without the expert assistance?
Call for interest
This call for interest aims to find out in which domain of those proposed in the workshop you are interested and also if you are willing to contribute. We require you to fill in the call for interest to get an idea of potential attendees (infrastructure) and to tune the contents in function of your needs/proposals.
We are not requiring specifically any conference publication but rather contributions in one of the final proposed topics (e.g. presentation) although you could join to the workshop without contributing to any specific area.
This call for interest is done to better organise the contents of the workshop. The official REGISTRATION to the workshop must be done in the conference registration web page.
Filling in this call for interest does NOT allow you to assist to the ICALEPCS 25 conference or workshop.
Do not hesitate to give feedback with your proposals during the pre-inscription.
