Control technology is on its way to making the step to virtual control - Control 5.0. But haven't we just reached Industry 4.0? In order to better understand what developments are taking place in control technology, it is first worth looking back at the individual stages of evolution in this first article on the subject of virtual controllers. Part 2 then presents how to use virtual controllers and the possible use cases. However, one practical benefit is obvious: The dependency on hardware is dissolved - not a mistake in case of delivery bottlenecks.

New opportunities and freedoms for machine builders through the abstraction of hardware and the merging of OT and IT.

Shortage of supply has long since reached the field of automation technology. It is not only the chip shortage that leads to weeks of delays in the delivery of controllers and other intelligent automation components. How does a supplier of SoftPLCs deal with this problem? What can he do in order to bypass delivery problems? The German trade journal "etz magazine" interviewed Manfred Werner, CEO of the CODESYS Group, on this topic.

Due to supply bottlenecks, controllers currently need to be redesigned, and machines and systems need to be converted to control systems that are actually available. The solution: A SoftPLC that runs hardware-independently. CODESYS Virtual Control SL uses modern IT technologies such as containers, hypervisor/VM, Kubernetes, as well as OPC UA and web protocols to merge IT and OT. The virtual CODESYS SoftPLC therefore runs on conventional controllers as well as on edge servers, private or even public clouds - depending on the application's requirements regarding determinism and cycle time. The software defines the function, the hardware provides the necessary resources.

A technology demonstrator from SEW Eurodrive shows how cooperating robots implement complex applications quickly and economically. Even large automation systems can be built up modularly from smaller subsystems, some of which operate autonomously.

Kontron is expanding the "SL i.MX6 UL" system-on-module to include the CODESYS automation software for engineering industrial control systems. Complex control tasks can be implemented quickly and easily using the hardware-independent development environment.