Concept

An efficient engineering process becomes more and more important as the complexity and level of automation of machines and systems increases. The manual transfer to a TwinCAT project of an I/O topology that you have already created within the scope of electrical planning in an ECAD tool leads to high additional costs and is a potential cause of error, especially with large topologies. The TwinCAT 3 AML data exchange, on which the new TwinCAT 3 XCAD Interface is based, therefore facilitates automated creation of a topology by importing data from the ECAD tool, which saves 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. This allows you to parallelize the electrical planning and software engineering and to minimize the time required for the entire engineering process. Further information about TwinCAT 3 AML data exchange can be found in the corresponding documentation.

XCAD Plugins

The TwinCAT 3 XCAD interface internally uses the TwinCAT 3 AML data exchange and supplements its function with a plugin concept. This concept provides for additional functionalities to be executed both when importing and exporting the AML file via the XCAD interface. These additional functionalities make it possible to enrich the AML file on the one hand and the TwinCAT project on the other, thus generating the highest possible added value in the exchange between the ECAD software and TwinCAT.

Global variables are used for information exchange between plugins. A part of these variables is provided directly by the XCAD interface, the other part is generated by the plugins. This creates dependencies between the plugins. For example, the Prepare PLC variables plugin generates a list of PLC variables, which in turn is used as a basis in the Convert PLC variable names plugin. If the first plugin is disabled, a corresponding warning will be displayed in the other plugin. All available plugins are listed in the XCAD Interface Options, where they can be activated and set. A description of the plugins can be found in the chapter Reference plugins.

The additional functions of the TwinCAT 3 XCAD Interface compared to TwinCAT 3 AML Data Exchange are summarized in the following table. More information about the workflow and the resulting possibilities are described in the following chapter.

See also

• TwinCAT 3 AML data exchange
• Workflow
• Dialog: XCAD Interface Options
• Reference plugins