Totally Integrated Automation

The Siemens Industry Automation Division has introduced the industry’s first automation software with One Engineering Environment and One Software Project for all automation tasks called the Totally Integrated Automation Portal (TIA Portal). The new software engineering framework enables users to develop and commission automation systems quickly and intuitively, which eliminates the traditional time-consuming and costly integration of separate software packages. Designed for high efficiency and user-friendliness, the TIA Portal is suitable for both first-time users and experienced users. Furthermore, the TIA Portal will be the basis of all future software engineering packages for configuring, programming, and commissioning automation and drives products in the Totally Integrated Automation portfolio from Siemens. Examples of this include the new Simatic Step 7 V11 automation software for Simatic controllers, and Simatic WinCC V11 for Simatic HMI and process visualization applications.

For the design of the TIA Portal framework, Siemens studied many typical software engineering applications over several years, and then analyzed and evaluated its customer requirements worldwide. As an integral component of all software engineering packages from Siemens, the TIA Portal framework provides advanced shared services across all the configuration interfaces, ensuring uniform navigation for the user and consistent system behavior. For example, all devices and networks in any automation system can now be configured within one shared device and network editor. Project navigation, library concepts, data management, project storage, diagnostics, and online functions are standard features and made available to the user in the shared TIA Portal framework. This unified software development environment offers a high level of efficiency across the overall automation project and is comprised of programmable controllers, HMI devices, and drives. Additionally, all data management for controller parameters, blocks, tags, or messages now need to be entered only once, saving significant time and cost for software engineering of an automation project. The design of TIA Portal is based on advanced object-oriented software architecture and centralized data management, providing seamless data consistency by automatically avoiding data entry errors. Users can easily find data and program blocks across the entire automation project using a project-wide cross-reference system, which greatly reduces the time to troubleshoot and debug a typical software project.