Advice on TIA Portal Versions & OPC UA for a Decentralized Fault-Tolerant Project

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I am an MSc student working on a dissertation project about Decentralized Autonomous Manufacturing. My goal is to create a “Fault-Resilient” factory where I have 3 separate PLCs controlling different stations. If one PLC fails, the others detect the failure and reroute the production autonomously.

I am planning to use TIA Portal for the logic and Simumatik for the physical twin. Before I start the heavy development, I wanted to double-check the best setup with this community to avoid compatibility issues later.

Could you please help me with these specific questions?

1. Recommended Software Versions I am planning to use TIA Portal V19. Which version of PLCSIM Advanced is currently the most stable for the Simumatik Gateway?

  • Should I stick to PLCSIM Advanced V6.0, or does the Gateway fully support the newer V7.0/V8.0 without API errors?

2. Communication Protocol (OPC UA vs. API) I keep hearing about OPC UA.

  • In simple terms, is OPC UA better for connecting TIA Portal to Simumatik for a multi-PLC setup, or should I just stick to the standard S7 / PLCSIM API connection?
  • Does OPC UA add too much latency (lag) for a real-time “Self-Healing” simulation?

3. Enabling the Connection If I do use OPC UA (or the PLCSIM API), what are the exact steps to enable it?

  • In TIA Portal: Do I just check “Allow PUT/GET” and “Support Simulation,” or do I need to activate a specific “OPC UA Server” license/box in the CPU settings?
  • In Simumatik: How do I point the Gateway to look for 3 separate PLC IP addresses (e.g., 192.168.0.1, 0.2, 0.3) at the same time?

4. Project Feasibility Has anyone here successfully simulated 3 concurrent PLCs talking to one Simumatik system? Are there any known performance bottlenecks I should be aware of (e.g., should I increase the cycle time monitoring)?

Thanks in advance for your help!

these question are asked by me but used ai to make beter as english is not my first language

2

Hi and thanks for writting in the forum!

Here are the answers to your questions:

  1. I would recommend you use the latest version of the PLCSim Advanced you can get. We have tested with TIA v20 too. V6, V7 and V8 should work equaly, the API has not changed as far as we know.

  2. I would say OPCUA is maybe easiest to set up, but the slowest of all. S7 and PLCSim API (not advanced) are address based while PLCSim Advanced API is tag based (it also allows read/write on safety areas). It depends what you preffer, and if you have PLCSIM Advanced licenses or not, but all 3 are quite fast and more recommended than OPCUA.

  3. For PLCSIM API you do not need to enable OPCUA, just Support Simulation and PUT/GET. Take a look to the Academy videos. Regarding separate PLCs, you will need separe PLCSIM instances and each of the using different IP addresses which you set in Simumatik. I do not remember if PLCSIM (not advanced) allows several instances in the same PC at the same time.

  4. Regarding connecting a Simumatik System to several PLCs, there is no technical limitation and we know seccusfull cases with up to 4-5 PLCs at the same time. It all depends on the amount of signals and how you distribute the PLCs. If you try to simulate all PLCs in the same PLC you may need quite many cores to run all those to ensure a good execution. Distributing PLC emulation and the model execution in few PCs may be recommended. Take a look to the system requirements of an instance of PLCSim.

Regards,