Company: GreyLogix Brasil

Technologies

• C#;
• VBScript
• FBD (Functional Block Diagram);

COMOS and TIA Portal are two softwares sold by Siemens:

COMOS

COMOS is a plant engineering software from Siemens. The applications for this software are in the process industries for the engineering, operation, and maintenance of process plants as well as their asset management.

TIA Portal

TIA Portal is basically a platform system integrators use to program PLC's that will automate the industry's machinery.

COMOS is mainly a documentation software, whilst TIA Portal is like an IDE for industrial automation. The plugin I developed runs inside of COMOS and could do baically three things:

Hardware information exchange

The plant's hardware (CPU's, sensors, actuators) could be configured in any of both softwares and information could be exchanged and updated in the other software.

Software information exchange

The actual program could be written in any of both softwares and could be translated and exchanged to the other one.

Comparison

Both hardware and software could be compared. So The user could know if, for example, the software as documented inside COMOS actually matched the one running in TIA.

Some of the information could be exchanged via API's on both ends, but a lot of information required exchanging XML's. Coding inside TIA Portal is not done in text, but graphically (FBD), drawing and connecting function blocks available in the IDE. TIA Portal would only export the code in XML format, which was quite complex to interpret and transform into COMOS's FUP (Funktionsplan) convention.