Itris Automation Square launches PLC DocGen,
an automatic documentation generation tool

Grenoble, France, August 27th 2009 – Itris Automation Square, an independent software vendor offering highly innovative solutions for the development of PLC programs, announced today the launch of PLC DocGen. PLC DocGen automatically generates a precise and synthetic documentation, thus helping reverse engineering be it for new developments based on legacy code or for maintenance and modernization.

During its whole lifecycle, a typical PLC program will be read and modified by many contributors: development and commissioning teams, maintenance and modernization technicians and engineers, project managers. Unfortunately, the code is often the only available documentation and working on an undocumented program is always a major loss of time. Also, manually writing documentation is tiresome and error-prone. The need for a perfectly consistent format and the tediousness of the task argue for an automated tool based approach; that’s what PLC DocGen offers.

Indeed, PLC DocGen automatically generates a dataflow oriented view of a PLC program (from inputs towards outputs) represented by equations and flowcharts, thus abstracting the actual sequential execution of the program. This view is a perfect intermediate formalism between specifications and the code itself. It is independent from the programming style and the type (and vendor) of PLC hardware on which the program runs. Also, PLC DocGen may use as a parameter any kind of documentation template (title blocks, symbols…) thus ensuring a consistent formatting for all documents.

"Launching PLC DocGen allows us to address another need of automation engineers. PLC DocGen complements our existing product portfolio already consisting in automatic PLC programs conversion and coding rules verification tools. Thus, we keep leveraging our innovative software engineering technologies to bring our customers new solutions that help them tame the growing complexity of PLC programs." explains Eric Pierrel, Marketing Director of Itris Automation Square.

PLC DocGen is available for programs written for April/Orphée, SMC, TSX Série7 and Unity (Premium, Quantum and M340) PLCs offered by Schneider Electric and for Step7 and Step5 PLCs offered by Siemens.
It is sold by Itris Automation Square as a service with accompanying training and consulting offerings.

About Itris Automation Square
Itris Automation Square offers highly innovative development tools for Programmable Logic Controllers. Its solutions, based on advanced computer science techniques, allow the automatic translation of PLC programs as well as the improvement of their quality and their reverse engineering. Itris Automation Square is a French company based in Grenoble. For more information: www.automationsquare.com

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