Plant-wide engineering

In a modular machine/plant, a plant-wide configuration tool is appropriate that defines the relationship between the separate machine/plant subsystems or machine units.

SIMATIC iMap is a component-based software tool for configuring communication in distributed automation solutions. SIMATIC iMap is used to graphically configure the data exchange between technological modules.

To ensure data exchange between devices of different manufacturers, SIMATIC iMap is based on PROFINET – the standard communication protocol of PROFIBUS International.

PROFINET defines communication based on TCP /IP and Industrial Ethernet.

SIMATIC iMap can be integrated into the SIMATIC software landscape as a higher-level configuring tool. In this case, the library elements are created using STEP 7.