Posted to News on 20th Mar 2015, 00:00
New PAC platform designed to meet the needs of Industry 4.0
With its newly developed the 'next generation programmable automation controller (PAC), Mitsubishi Electric says it is the first to market with a controller that is designed to meet the needs of industry 4.0. The MELSEC iQ-R has been designed to help users significantly reduce development costs as well as maintenance and operating costs. At the same time, considerably improved processing performance will guarantee increased security, safety, reliable production processes and reduced downtime.
>With the MELSEC iQ-R control concept intellectual property is guaranteed to be fully protected by the wide range of security functions which include an additional security hardware key and an IP-based access filter and user authentication. These security measures will also offer considerable protection against the growing threat of cyber-attacks.
>Improved debugging and error recovery functions will enable commissioning and maintenance work and associated costs to be reduced further. The functions provided include the creation of an operating history as well as error and event logging.
>With data management and manipulation becoming increasingly important and vital to meet the demands of Industry 4.0, the MELSEC iQ-R has an embedded database function which enables recipe, batch or other process data to be stored in a user friendly format. This turns the thousands of pieces of data in the database into useful information for production, preventative maintenance, etc.
>The optimised system design allows the integration of standard and safety control systems on one single rack and it is also possible to connect to open networks such as CC-Link, CC-Link IE Field and a wide range of other open networks. Users will also have a range of integrated communication protocols to choose from in order to make the process of connection as simple as possible.
>Besides this enhanced connectivity, the MELSEC iQ-R is fully backward compatible with its sister series, MELSEC Q both from a software and hardware perspective, which enables seamless migration.
>The MELSEC iQ-R series is programmed with the new and improved GX Works3 programming software which is part of the iQ Works integrated engineering environment. GX Works3 offers a wide range of options including dynamic labels, parameterisation instead of programming and the automatic creation of hardware function blocks as well as visual function blocks including HMI templates. These features help to reduce development costs and development errors.
