ABB software suite promises greater efficiency of control projects

Jul. 14, 2015 – The speed and efficiency of industrial control and machinery automation projects claim to be enhanced significantly with the new release of ABB’s integrated development toolsuite.

Automation Builder 1.1 promises an integrated development environment for solutions using the spectrum of automation components — including PLCs and safety PLCs, motion controllers, drives, robots and HMIs — while substantially reducing software complexity and cutting time to market and cost of ownership. The latest release  extends the data exchange capabilities with electrical planning and engineering software, with a new bi-directional interface to the widely-used EPLAN Electric P8. Electrical automation and PLC design data may be imported, modified and transferred back to the electrical CAD environment, which it says will eliminate any need to manually enter data and thereby ensuring synchronization of signal identification between the two software environments. ABB estimates the Automation Builder environment can reduce development engineering effort by around 30 per cent for medium complexity projects, and deliver even higher savings on large-scale projects.