When working with automation devices engineers are often required to make temporary application changes in order to keep production running (for example interlock bypasses). These changes if forgotten about can impact on safety or result in equipment failures and production loss. The challenge is to be able to quickly identify where such changes have been made and keep a persistent record so they can be repaired as soon as possible.
Current manual processes for recording changes made and weekly review meetings result in engineering staff losing hours of otherwise productive time and are not accurate resulting in permanent but unwanted changes to controller applications.
Versiondog provides the ability to rapidly compare different application versions in order to detect and document changes made to process control software. This functionality is built-in and native for many applications (InTouch, Siemens products, Word, Excel and PDF are examples of native support) no software other than the versiondog client is required in this case.
| 1) Version Compare - Rapid and Detailed comparision highlighting version differences (Siemens S7 Example) | |
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In this example screenshot you can see the the level of detail that versiondog provides when comparing program versions. Even a change in a DB (data block) is detected, the differences can be stepped through one at a time. Differences between the current PLC Machine Code, the working version or archived versions can be displayed with a simple selection and click of a mouse. This can typically take hours where versionsdog is not available. In the case of Siemens S5 & S7 programs the Step 7 editor software is not used to generate the differences. These programs can be large but versiondog ensures the most optimal speed with native support. |
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| 2) Version Compare - Rapid and Detailed comparision highlighting version differences (Siemens WinCC Example) | |
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Here again is an example showing the output of a comparison this time with Siemens WinCC. Notice on the left how the application structure is presented as a tree. Changing to the life-cycle view shows only the branches where changes beween versions exist. |
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