Summary

This chapter covered the fundamental requirements for structuring and managing the data that's used throughout a project. We have highlighted that TIA Portal is a hierarchical development environment and that changes to dependency objects will affect objects that depend on them. This can ripple through a project and affect any object.

We also learned about global/instance data and demonstrated that these data types are at the heart of data management and that we should consider how they are used throughout a project. After that, we learned about optimized and non-optimized data and highlighted how it affects a project and how it may or may not be suited for the application you're designing. Remember that how data is passed through the interfaces of program blocks can make a big difference to the efficiency of the PLC's runtime.

The next chapter builds upon the lessons we've learned regarding structure and hierarchy. We will introduce the concept of...