Model-based automated generation of siemens plc projects using tia portal openness and factory I/O

In Today’s Industry context, the demand of PLC-based automation systems is continuously increasing, leading to a growing need to automate and accelerate the creation and update of PLC programs. In many engineering workflows, PLC development still relies on manual and point-and-click activities, which are time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to inconsistencies. Modern automation systems therefore are required to support modularity, reusability, and frequent reconfiguration. This thesis presents the development of an automatic tool that supports the creation and update of industrial automation projects in Siemens TIA Portal. The main objective is to reduce engineering effort and likelihood of human errors by automating repetitive and error-prone tasks performed during PLC project development, including hardware configuration, I/O addressing, and the generation of software structures. The proposed approach is based on a specification-driven workflow, where the characteristics of the industrial process are described through user-editable configuration files, such as Excel or XML documents. These specifications are interpreted by a C# application exploiting Siemens TIA Portal Openness, enabling the automatic generation and update of PLC projects in a consistent and reproducible manner. The thesis is developed through two parallel activities. The first focuses on the implementation of the C# automation tool for TIA Portal, covering project creation, hardware setup, rack configuration, and control software generation. The second activity concerns the modelling of the industrial process in Factory I/O, which is used as a digital twin environment to define sensors and actuators and ensure a consistent mapping between the simulated process and the PLC project. The case study results suggest that the proposed approach can improve consistency, reusability, and maintainability of PLC projects, while reducing manual engineering effort and commissioning risks.