Concept

An efficient engineering process becomes more and more important as the complexity and level of automation of machines and plants increases. The manual adoption of an I/O topology into a TwinCAT project that you have already created in an ECAD tool as part of the electrical planning leads to high increased costs, especially with large topologies. The TwinCAT 3 AML data exchange therefore enables the automatic creation of a topology by importing the data from the ECAD tool, thus saving a great deal of time.

The fundamental import and export functionality is based on the standardized exchange format AutomationML (AML for short), with whose help the topology data can be exchanged bidirectionally between the ECAD tools and TwinCAT. This is ensured by a simple and universal change management, as you can adopt changes from both directions into the respective other tool.

The AML format also allows an incremental import. Therefore, you can commence with the implementation of the software and the first import of the I/O topology into TwinCAT at an early stage of the electrical planning, because further imports of the updated version are also possible later on. Differences between the versions from the ECAD tool and from TwinCAT can be compared and managed with the help of the TwinCAT Project Compare during the import. In this way you can parallelize the electrical planning and software engineering and minimize the time required for the complete engineering.

The TwinCAT AML data exchange supports the following engineering workflows:

▪: Creation of the topology in the ECAD tool and initial import of the data into TwinCAT 3

▪: Creation of the topology in TwinCAT (e.g. by means of a scan) and initial export of the data for further use in an ECAD tool

▪: Changes in the ECAD tool after a preceding initial data exchange with subsequent data comparison through an incremental import of the data into TwinCAT

▪: Changes in TwinCAT 3 after a preceding initial data exchange with subsequent data comparison through an incremental export of the data from TwinCAT

Requirement

The AML data exchange is available from TwinCAT 3.1 Build 4024 and requires the use of the AutomationML format for the data exchange.

Bus systems supported

Only EtherCAT topologies are supported.