A software defined (SD) process control system (SDCS) includes a method executed by a discovery service for inferring information regarding a physical or logical asset of a process plant. The method includes obtaining an announcement indicative of a presence of a physical or logical asset of the process plant. The method also includes obtaining, from a context dictionary, one or more parameters retrievable from the physical or logical asset or one or more services associated with the physical or logical asset that were not indicated in the announcement. Furthermore, the method includes storing a record of the discovered physical or logical asset in a discovered item data store. The record includes an indication of the identity of the physical or logical asset and the one or more parameters or one or more services associated with the physical or logical asset that were not indicated in the announcement.

A method for providing recommendations concerning a project configuration to configure an industrial system includes: receiving via an interface a project query related to re-configuring the industrial system, represented by a knowledge graph, wherein components of a set of components are represented by graph nodes and relations between two components which are represented by edges between the corresponding nodes; automatically mining logical rules from the knowledge graph which are assigned to confidence values, whereby the confidence value of each rule is estimated by determining the frequency of occurrence of the rule body in the knowledge graph and by validating if the rule head holds; predicting candidate components of the project query for each logical rule by calculating a score for each candidate component; generating at least one recommendation; and—outputting the generated at least one recommendation to a user via a user interface or executing the generated recommendations.

An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) includes analytic features that generate control project telemetry data based on analysis of a control system design and uses this project telemetry data as the basis for control system design guidance and recommendations. The IDE system can analyze the control system design and identify industrial devices use by the control project, device features that are utilized by the control project, resource utilizations, and other such project telemetry. The IDE system can generate recommendations for improving the control system design based on this project telemetry. The project telemetry data can also be provided to product vendors, offering insights into how the vendors' products are being used by end customers.

A method for detecting misconfigured industrial automation devices within an operational technology (OT) network of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and/or distributed control systems (DCSs), each PLC including one or more central processing unit (CPU) cards, one or more communication cards, and one or more input/out (I/O) cards, each I/O card controlling a machine or process in a physical network, the method including parsing a project file that includes information about a PLC and its configuration, and about the logic that runs on the PLC, generating a network layout configured in the project the, based on the results of the parsing, scanning the PLC including extracting information regarding the PLC configuration and the network layout, generating an actual network layout, based on the results of the scanning, and comparing the actual network layout with the network layout configured in the project file, to detect misconfigurations in the project file.

A device determination system includes an assistance device configured to assist a work for a workpiece stacked in a stacking area and having portability so as to be freely arranged, an image capturing device capable of capturing an image of the stacking area, and a control device configured to determine an arrangement position and an arrangement orientation of the assistance device in the stacking area based on the captured image captured by the image capturing device, in which the assistance device includes an indicator by which a position and an orientation of the assistance device reflected in the captured image can be identified, and the control device detects the indicator included in the captured image so as to determine the arrangement position and the arrangement orientation.

A program verification system includes a PLC that calculates control output data corresponding to control input data by using a control program for controlling an apparatus to be controlled, and outputs the control output data to an input/output device, and a collation unit that performs operation verification of the control program by collating test output data included in a test pattern, which is a combination of test input data and the test output data satisfying operation specifications of the apparatus to be controlled and indicates a temporal change, with the control output data calculated by the PLC, and the PLC includes a control unit that, when operation verification of the control program is performed, if there is an instruction to refer to the control input data in the control program, generates first time information in the PLC, extracts the test input data corresponding to the first time information from the test pattern, and calculates control output data by using the extracted test input data and the control program.

A method includes requesting a controller, which controls one or more field devices in an industrial control network, to report code currently used by the controller for controlling the field devices. The code reported by the controller is compared with a stored baseline version of the code, and a notification is issued upon detecting a discrepancy between the code reported by the controller and the baseline version.

A method for verifying the design of a function module in an industrial plant having control logic for a physical process; logic to accept commands from a superordinate management system; communication between logics and between the function module and the industrial plant; and input/output channels, the method comprising: obtaining a ruleset comprising at least requirements for I/O channels and their connections that are necessary conditions for the function module to perform its intended function in the industrial plant; checking whether the input/output channels of the function module and their connections meet the rules in the ruleset; and in response to determining that at least one rule in the ruleset is not met, determining that the design of the function module has an error, and preventing use of the function module in the modular industrial plant.

A method creates gripping-task-specific gripper sequence programs of an item gripper which is controlled by a gripper control module and has a gripper main body and a gripping tool. The item gripper transmits a gripper-main-body-specific identification signal to the gripper control module. The gripper control module assigns a gripper dataset from a database to this identification signal. The dataset has an allowable value range for each settable parameter of the item gripper. A gripping-task-specific configuration dataset for the item gripper is created by a peripheral device. The gripper control module determines gripping-task-specific target values and test criteria. A processing unit of the item gripper establishes the time profile of the actuation of the gripper drive from the target values and determines gripper-specific test values from the test criteria. The present method creates both a sequence program for closing the item gripper and a sequence program for opening the item gripper.

A field device commissioning system includes a commissioning tool configured to communicate with a repository and an input-output (IO) device, the IO device is configured to communicate with a field device. The commissioning tool includes a first processor configured to retrieve engineering data for the IO device or the field device from the repository, retrieve a first configuration parameter value for the IO device or the field device from the IO device, determine a second configuration parameter value for the IO device or the field device from the retrieved engineering data, the second configuration parameter corresponds to the first configuration parameter, determine if the first configuration parameter value is the same as the second configuration parameter value; and generate alert on a user interface with when the first configuration parameter value is not the same as the second configuration parameter value, wherein the IO device comprises a second processor.