Automation Studio 4 is designed to implement engineering processes efficiently and effectively, according to B&R Industrial Automation.
Automation Studio 4 is now available to all users. "Despite increasing product complexity, this newly designed integrated automation software fulfills three important goals at once: keeping quality high, engineering costs low and time to market short," said a company spokesperson. "This software from B&R Industrial Automation is designed to allow engineering processes to be implemented efficiently and effectively."
The new System Designer tool features a visual editor and offers lifelike representations of hardware components. This design tool includes an automated plausibility check and configures basic parameter settings, in addition to functions for reusing entire parts of a system. According to the company, this helps provide optimal support for creating modular machines with all of their variants and options.
A bidirectional EPLAN Electric P8 interface allows developers to integrate ECAD projects with hardware configurations designed in Automation Studio. This is intended to reduce the amount of work required and eliminate one possible error source that arises from having two sets of master data. Similar interfaces to simulation software allow applications to be generated automatically from simulation data in order to test development results at an early stage.
Full support for project modularity in Automation Studio 4 makes it possible to split each individual project into a series of autonomous modules. This allows a team of software engineers to work on these modules simultaneously and load them to the hardware separately. Concurrent engineering not only shortens development times, but also makes it easier to integrate external developers into the process and reuse parts of the system that have already been tested.
"In addition, communication via OPC Unified Architecture ensures compatibility with numerous systems from other manufacturers," said the spokesperson. "Direct support of web technologies facilitates the development of visualization, process control and remote maintenance applications.
"Object-oriented programming in Automation Studio 4 has become more efficient due to the SmartEdit feature that generates context-related suggestions from function libraries and existing program sections. Visualization templates also accelerate user interface design."
For more information contact:
B&R Industrial Automation Corp.
1250 Northmeadow Parkway, S-100
Roswell, GA 30076
770-772-0400
www.br-automation.com