Enforce Standards

UCOS actually enforces the project specification resulting in greater consistency and reliability.

For a large control system, it could take dozens of engineers many months to write thousands of lines of rung ladder logic requiring reams of documentation and a magnifying glass to decipher it all.

Without a way to enforce standards among all those people writing logic, consistency becomes a problem. Inconsistent logic makes it difficult to maintain and upgrade the system, train new engineers, and is a leading source of problems during testing and installation.

And what happens when one developer finds a "better" way to implement the spec, but doesn't tell other developers?

Without a way to enforce standards – to enforce the specification – there's no telling what you'll end up with.

UCOS templates eliminate those problems.

Using UCOS templates, a handful of master engineers design, develop, test, and certify all the components of a control system. These components define a company's standard method for controlling valves, monitoring alarms, sequencing pumps – basically they define the specification.

Then a small group of developers use those components to assemble the control system. If they need to insert a pump, they simply pick a pre-tested, pre-certified pump template of the appropriate type. There's no need to interpret the specification, and each pump will adhere strictly to the spec – even if it was inserted by different developers.

This results in more consistency throughout the system, greater reliability, and requires fewer developers.

We recommend a fascinating white paper on this subject called "Standardization in SCADA Automation" (PDF 50K).

This is a non-commercial review of current standardization methodologies, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and it examines a new approach that is gaining acceptance.