Simulation Example

The customer in this example case was a steel company, and IPACT had installed a blast furnace charging system, consisting of several PLCs and HMIs, for them.  As part of the project, an I/O simulation had been performed, and the system had been exhaustively tested against it before installation.

The system had been running in the field for about five years when a major automation upgrade to the stoves put numerous new devices and a lot more traffic on the PLC communication network.  Shortly after that, some anomalous behavior never before seen began to appear (and disappear) sporadically on the charging system.

It was not at all obvious what was causing this problem, but in an attempt to diagnose it, IPACT took the current charging system PLC programs back to our office, “spun up” the simulation, and set up the charging system again to run against the simulation.  It ran flawlessly – until we added lot of network traffic.  At that point the exact same problem began to appear sporadically that had been seen in the field.  By adding even more network traffic, we were able to make the problem “stick”, and that allowed us to pinpoint and solve it.  The simulation had proved its value – again.