Integrated diagnostics – Minimizing downtimes, reducing maintenance efforts

Increases in productivity are being achieved more and more through savings in costs. In this context, the focus is increasingly on maintenance. The emphasis here is on rectifying faults quickly with the lowest possible personnel outlay, in order to prevent costly downtimes. Ideally, the operating personnel should also perform part of the maintenance tasks. The operating personnel are on-site, they are familiar with the procedures and can intervene quickly. This saves time and reduces costs. If additional professional maintenance personnel are needed, it is important that the right specialist is called in.

This prevents expensive services being wasted by sending several specialists to the plant to cover all eventualities. This can only be achieved if clear fault diagnostics are obtained first. Fault diagnostics can be implemented using intelligent diagnostic tools and with comprehensive functionality.

Intelligent diagnostic tools

• speed up the configuration of fault messages
• enable significantly faster and more accurate fault diagnostics during normal operation
• and offer suggestions for fault rectification.

Experience has shown that approximately 80% of all faults occur on the equipment units of the production installations. PLC components are only affected in 20% of the cases.

Process diagnostics

Diagnostics that detect and indicate faulty states in the process allow problems to be rectified quickly where they arise. Process diagnostics are plant-specific and cannot therefore be integrated into the PLC hardware or firmware. They are programmed by the manufacturer of the production plant and integrated into the user program. It is necessary to use diagnostic tools here (S7-PDIAG, for example) that significantly reduce the development costs and that provide a wide range of functions during normal operation.
Functions for diagnosing process faults are configured in an efficient and time-saving way in the SIMATIC Controllers instead of using high-overhead programming. This reduces the costs of implementing process diagnostics for the manufacturer and the operator profits from increased plant availability.

System diagnostics

Internal diagnostics that indicate any faults in the system are standard today. SIMATIC Controllers provide particularly effective integral system diagnostics for signaling system faults of this type.
All SIMATIC Controllers have extensive functions for system diagnostics. Memory faults, short-circuits, wire breaks or module failures can be quickly detected and corrected in this way.
STEP 7 supports the diagnostics of system errors with the function "System error signaling". Components are also scanned here that are connected to the PLC over PROFIBUS or PROFINET. In a parameterization screen form, the sequence, contents and structure of the error message are combined to suit requirements without the need for any programming. The fault text can be taken in this case from Hardware Config or, in the case of fieldbus stations from the GSD (device data) file. STEP 7 generates the necessary STEP 7 function blocks and calls them in the user program.
All CPUs with integrated PROFINET interface offer web server functionality and permit diagnostics from any location via the Industrial Ethernet network.

Additional Information

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