Activation of the simulation mode

When the simulation button is clicked in original mode, the following dialog wizard (Figure 1) is opened.

Activation of the simulation mode 1:
Figure 1: Simulation On Wizard User Interface

The description of the command buttons of the Wizard is given in Table 1.

Push-Button Name

Description

Skip

Skips the step (only if it is optional)

Process

Processes one single step and stops afterwards

Process All

Processes all steps. If any step fails, then the processing will be stopped

Cancel

Cancels the further processing of the steps and closes the Wizard-Dialog

Finish

All steps processed successfully and the "Finish" button closes the Wizard-Dialog

Redo

Appears when one step fails. This gives the opportunity to repeat the actual step.

Table 1: Buttons on the Wizard

The switchover to simulation mode is performed in several steps (Figure 1 and Table 2). Some of these steps are mandatory and some are optional (that is they can be bypassed with the 'skip' button).

Requirements

Step

Name

Description

1

Set system(s) to 'Config' mode

All participating systems will be set to 'Config' mode. If the local system is one of these systems, the TwinCAT Simulation manager first sends the 'Reconfig' command to this system. If the local system reaches the 'Config' mode, the 'Restart' command is send to all other remote systems at the same time. The Step succeeds if all systems are in 'Config' mode.

2

Process simulation settings

The current I/O mappings are linked (locally or remotely) to the simulation PLC, axes are switched over to simulation mode and (simulated) devices are deactivated!
The created simulation profile is not used if it is not activated and until the TwinCAT system has performed a restart. The step is succeeded when no error occurred setting the configurations.

3

Save TwinCAT Configuration(s)

Saves the locally cached TwinCAT System Manager Configuration files of all participating systems.

4

Activate Configurations(s)

Activate the configurations on the targets. The configurations will remain inactive until a TwinCAT restart is carried out on the target.

The command will succeed if the activating processes ran through without errors.

5

Restart TwinCAT System(s)

Restarts the TwinCAT target systems with the activate configurations. Like in Step 1, first the (optional) local system will be restarted and as second step all 'remote' ones in parallel. This step is succeeded if all targets are in 'Run' mode.

6

Write the simulation state

Resets the 'dwSimState' Global PLC Variable to '1' for all participating PLCs. This Symbol is the indicator for the PLCs that the system is in "Original" or "Simulation" mode. The step succeeds if the targets are reachable, the Symbol (TcSimManager.lib) is contained in the PLC project and the value could be written with success.

Table 2: Process Steps to change from Original Mode --> Simulation Mode

If all steps succeeded the wizard looks like shown in Figure 2.

Activation of the simulation mode 2:
Figure 2: Wizard Dialog when successfully set to the simulation mode

The wizard can now be closed via the "Finish" button.