TwinCAT Analytics One-Klick Dashboard

The TwinCAT 3 Analytics Workbench is a TwinCAT 3 engineering product for the creation of continual data analyses from various spatially distributed machine controllers. The configuration of the workbench is integrated in Microsoft Visual Studio^® and serves as the graphic user interface. Many algorithms are available in a toolbox for the configuration of the analysis:

The TwinCAT 3 Analytics Logger ensures the cycle-synchronous acquisition of process and application data from the machine controller. The logger is characterized by high performance because it works directly in the real-time context of the TwinCAT controller. The data acquired is optionally transmitted to a message broker via the IoT communication protocol MQTT or stored locally in a file on the hard drive of the machine control and recorded with ring buffer functionality. The configuration necessary for this is done in Microsoft Visual Studio^® within the TwinCAT project. All variables of the process image and the PLC application can easily be added to the configuration via checkbox without any programming effort.

The TwinCAT 3 Analytics Library is a PLC library with analysis functions for process and application data. It can be used locally on the machine controller or on a remote analysis system with an IoT communication connection. In both use cases, a great deal of engineering time can be saved with the automatic PLC code generation by the TE3500 TwinCAT 3 Analytics Workbench. For local use, only the mapping takes place manually; in the IoT workflow, even the mapping is omitted and is carried out automatically.

The TwinCAT 3 Analytics Runtime is the runtime “container” for the Analytics application, which was configured and developed in the TE3500 TwinCAT 3 Analytics Workbench. The runtime can be installed locally, on remote hardware or in a virtual machine. It also contains the TF2000 TwinCAT 3 HMI Server, which hosts the analytics dashboard. In summary, the TwinCAT 3 Analytics Runtime represents a bundle of different licenses. It contains a PLC runtime, the Analytics PLC library, the IoT connection with MQTT and HTTPS/Rest, the Storage Provider connection, the TwinCAT 3 HMI Server and a corresponding client package, so that several users can view the designed Analytics Dashboard simultaneously.