In recent years, PLC Market Overview

According to the global PLC market report released by Frorst & Sullivan, there is sufficient evidence that the PLC market has shown positive growth in all areas. The PLC market has shown a strong rebound after experiingficant decline in previous years in the past decade. It is estimated that the market will reach 14.85 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, an increase of 40% over the previous five years. It is exciting that small and medium sized PLC will play a crucial role in the market growth.

ARC published a report on the market development of PLCs and PACs in August 2015. The key points are: The PLC and PAC markets expanded in 2014. Among them, China and North America are the engines of growth. The growth prospects for the market in 2015 and 2016 are not expected to be optimistic, mainly due to the fact that the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are no longer growth drivers. It is estimated that the current installed capacity of PLC amounts to 52 million units, of which a small amount of PLC accounts for a considerable amount and it is estimated that by 2019 it will reach 65 million units.

A large number of them have reached the final stages of their life cycle in the next five years. The upgrading of existing installed PLC will be an important factor in the growth of PLC market in the next 5 years. In addition, software and services are becoming more and more important to PLC suppliers and end users. End users will require more hardware requirements to complete the use of software to achieve. PLC related services have become more important. In order to focus more on their core competencies and make more efficient use of engineering resources, some end-users have outsourced many PLC related services such as configuration, training and maintenance. There are signs that more and more users are planning to outsource most of their maintenance, training or spare parts business has become a trend

According to the discussions in the social network by the relevant U.S. automation professionals, the more concentrated opinion is that the end user drives the market. Mechanical equipment manufacturers prefer PLC, because it is simple and reliable, cost-effective. From a technical point of view, it is to grasp the PLC population of people far more than the PC and PAC control of the crowd. However, it can not be assumed that PLC will always maintain its traditional form.

In the next five years, due to the rapid popularization of industrial internet of things and the gradual entry of cloud services into the industrial market, PLCs are required to provide an interface directly with upper management software information systems such as MES and ERP. The PLC system must be implemented from hardware and software Adapt to the needs of the new industrial revolution, that is, smart manufacturing, or PLC manufacturers will face serious challenges.

Intelligent manufacturing of new requirements for PLC functions

PLC as a device and device controller, in addition to the traditional logic control, sequence control, motion control, safety control functions, but also undertake the industrial 4.0 and intelligent manufacturing given the following tasks:

1. more and more sensors are used to monitor the environment, the health status of equipment and various parameters of the production process. The effective collection of these industrial big data forces the I / O of the PLC to be centrally installed in the rack and must be transformed For distributed I / O.

2. various types of intelligent components commonly used embedded PLC, or micro PLC, as far as possible in the field to complete more and more complex control tasks.

3.application software platform for the development of further development of engineering design automation and intelligence.

4. a substantial increase in seamless connectivity, the relevant control parameters and the status of the device can be directly transmitted to the host system and application software, and even sent to the cloud