Hi Peter, Well, if you want to use PLC4X to communicate with the real or the simulated PLC in order to execute various test-scenarios: then probably PLC4X is what you're looking for.
If you want to extract the PLC program from one PLC and write that to a simulator, then unfortunately PLC4X doesn't have that focus and therefore doesn't support this. The programming part of automation engineering is what every PLC vendor implements separately. Sometimes even one vendor has multiple ways of doing that for their different products. However, PLC4X does have the parts that you probably need to implement such a feature, however it will certainly require reverse engineering for almost every type of PLC. I had been thinking about starting to work on something like what you describe. However, my idea would have been to simulate just enough of a PLC for the engineering tool to accept it and to have the Engineering tool deploy the new program to that instead of a real PLC. This component would then pass the program to a CI/CD pipeline, just as you describe it. However, I knew this would be a lot of work and considering how well the industry accepted my offers in the past, I decided that I won't do this, as it's not worth it. They haven't even started thinking of concepts like continuous-integration or continuous-delivery or even testing. Chris -----Original Message----- From: Peter Saxton <pe...@petersaxton.uk> Sent: Dienstag, 3. Mai 2022 09:35 To: dev@plc4x.apache.org Subject: Scope of using PLC4x as simulated driver for PLC projects Hi everyone. First post here so apologies if my terminology is a bit off, I'm from a web software background. If I want to write behavior tests for a PLC project that already exists, is PLC4x the right tool for that job or would there be something better? Ideally I would be able to export a whole PLC project from a machine. Start that exported project in a soft/simulated PLC environment and run a suite of tests against the PLC logic. Ideally at no point would I be reliant on having the correct hardware. Reading through the PLC4x pages I found the section on "Testing (or using PLC4X without a PLC)". As I understand this this is for testing software outside the PLC but simulating a PLC. I would like to go the other way round and test a PLC project by simulating the outside world. I also looked at the section on the simulated protocol, but again I think this is for simulating values for a plc4x client. Essentially we'd like to write a test saying "when input 1 & 2 are on the output A is live", and check that the PLC code was going to do this. I'm interested in testing against Siemens PLC projects, however for getting started I would happily run a proof of concept on something like OpenPLC if that was easier without hardware. Cheers, Peter
