Set Up the Control System

After you have chosen an appropriate PLC, you must develop PLC phase logic and obtain an I/O Server. Contact your distributor to obtain the required I/O Server.

For the purpose of this section, we assume that the I/O Server is named TIDIR and is located on a client computer that has a network name of plcnode. We also assume that it has a configured Topic named TI_TOPIC. Thus, the I/O Server is accessed as follows:

\\plcnode\TIDIR\TI_TOPIC!<item_name>

The <item_name> is defined in Tag Linker.

Use the Tag Linker Access Editor dialog box to define an access name for the TIDIR I/O Server. Tag Linker provides a default Access named ControlSystem, which is associated with all of the AVEVA Batch Management control system tags, such as phase control, status, and parameter tags. Modify this Access Name to identify your I/O Server. This example makes the following modifications using the Access Editor:

Access Name:TI_Tags

Application:\\plcnode\TIDIR

Topic:TI_TOPIC

Protocol:SuiteLink

All the tags assigned to this Access Name are now associated with the TIDIR I/O Server located on plcnode. If you have multiple topics for the TIDIR I/O Server, or if you are using multiple I/O Servers, you must add a new Access Name for each.

Many of the tags that were created when the process model was constructed must be assigned the appropriate Access Name and associated with the proper Item. Use the Tag Linker View Filter Selection dialog box to select the required tags or groups of tags and then assign the appropriate Item Name. In this example, you would assign values such as V100 and C15000 to the Item Name field. You can change the Access for each tag if required. Because there is one Access Name in the example, you do not need to do this. You can enter other parameters, such as scaling.

Some tags (by default) are not associated with an Access Name. Instead, they have the AVEVA Batch Management Memory Tag parameter enabled. These tags are typically the system tags (string tags) that are used by AVEVA Batch Management to store system information during run time. If you need to use the information in these tags at the PLC level, you must enter and apply the appropriate Item Name.

After you have made the necessary modifications, open the Tag Linker main dialog box. On the File menu, click Validate. You may see a warning during the validation to indicate that the InTouch Access does not have tags associated with it. This is not unusual. The InTouch Access is used only when the InTouch HMI is used as an I/O Server.

When you perform a simulation export and then a subsequent DBLoad, the InTouch HMI is configured to obtain all its control system tag data directly from the AVEVA Batch Management Server. Now that an actual control system has been implemented, you want InTouch nodes to communicate with it to obtain tag data. To do this, on the File menu, click Runtime Export, and then use the DBLoad utility to load the .csv file.

For each Access that was defined using the Tag Linker, you must configure and run one instance of the IBCli application. The only exception is if you get a warning message during Tag Linker validation to indicate that no tags are associated with a particular access. In this case, you do not need an instance of IBCli. IBCli is configured using the Editor. For each instance of IBCli, you must configure several application parameters. For this example, you must configure one instance as follows:

Access Name:TI_Tags

Verbose Mode

The Access Name argument is required and should match one of the Access Names defined using the Tag Linker Access Editor. The Verbose Mode parameter option is useful for troubleshooting.