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Automation Master is an open source〔Automation Master Open Source Project, (Link )〕 community maintained project. Automation Master was created to assist in the design, implementation and operation of an automated system. The installation and startup of any automated system is very time consuming and costly. Much of the time spent starting up an automated system can be traced to the difficulties in providing an effective test of the computer based system in the integrator's laboratory. Traditional testing techniques required staging as much of the equipment as practical in the laboratory, and wiring up a simulator panel containing switches and indicator lights to all of the I/O modules on the PLC. The operator stations would be connected up to this "rats nest" of wires, switches, indicator lights, and equipment for the test. PLC software would be tested by sequencing the toggle switches to input the electrical signals to the input cards on the PLC, and then observing the response by software on the indicator lights and operator consoles. For small simple systems, this type of testing was manageable, and resulted in some degree of confidence that the control software would work once it was installed. However, the amount of time spent performing the test was relatively high, and a real time test could not be achieved. As systems become larger and more complex, this method of testing only achieves, at a significant cost, a basic hardware and configuration check. The testing of complex logic sequences, is an act of futility without the ability to accurately reproduce the timing relationships between signals. What was needed was the ability to exercise the control system's software in a real time environment. Real time simulation fills this void. Real time simulators such as Automation Master are PC based software packages, which utilize a model to mimic the automated system's reaction to the control software. ==History== Max Hitchens and George Rote began working on Industrial Automation projects in the late 1970s. One of their first projects was an automatic guided vehicle system for Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Lawton, Oklahoma. This system was to automatically transport material and finished goods around a massive tire factory. Mr. Hitchens' and Mr. Rote's previous experience in software development was mainly in office environments where logic could be debugged based upon simple CRT or printed output. So, after four months of writing software for the automated system, they took the software to the field and thus got their "baptism" into the real world debugging of large automated systems. An automatic vehicle would be dispatched to do a task and it would not show up at its destination. First, they had to find the vehicle which could be anywhere in the massive facility, then try to figure out what went wrong. After 6 months of 16 hour days - 7 days a week, they finally got the system running. Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Rote had other automatic guided vehicle projects and resolved to not repeat the Goodyear debugging experience. So, they build a custom simulator which attached to the guided vehicle system controller and pretended to be the factory floor. The activity of the guided vehicles was displayed on a color graphic display. The software could be debugged on their desks and with finished and debugged taken to the field and installed with minimum effort. Sometime later, Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Rote were demonstrating their AGV simulator to Conco-Tellus, a conveyor system manufacturer, when they were asked if they could build a simulator for conveyor systems. Of course, the answer was yes and the Real Time Conveyor Simulator (RTCS) was born.〔Gould, Lawrence S., Computer Graphics -- a new tool for verifying system design. MODERN MATERIALS HANDLING, March 7, 1983, pp. 60-63. (Link )〕 The RTCS was a custom system with 3 single-board computers. They were awarded a patent〔U.S. Patent 4,512,747, Material Conveying System Simulation and Monitoring Apparatus (Link )〕 for it in 1985. The RTCS was a specialty product which did not have a large market, but Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Rote continued refinement and development. Along this time the IBM PC was introduced and it was used to build the database necessary for the simulator. In the mid 1980s, a director for Bell Labs saw the simulator and wanted to try it out modeling software development projects. It was impractical on a custom hardware box. But since the code was written for Intel processors, it could possibly be converted to run on a PC. In exchange for free use of the software, Bell Labs contributed a development system and two software engineers to help with the conversion. It turned out to be not very difficult and within a few weeks RTCS was running on a PC. Well almost, the PC did not have enough power to meet the real time computing which the RTCS required. It did, however, make a great demonstration system. Now all was required was a disk and not 100 lbs of computer gear. As the 8088 PC metamorphosed into the 80286, customers were increasingly reluctant to spend thousands of dollars on a custom piece of computer gear. By the time the 80386 personal computers came out, the RTCS ceased to have a market. Fortunately, the 80386 and subsequently the 80486 had enough power to run the simulation in real time and Automation Master〔Automation Master Trademark (abandoned), (Link )〕 was born. Development continued until the mid 1990s when for a myriad of reasons, mainly the death of George Rote, it ceased. By this time, Automation Master embodied many thousands of hours of development and use. Automation Master languished until 2013 when Max Hitchens decided to create an open source project〔 and release it into the public domain. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Automation Master」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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