A role for IEC 61131-3

"I see a number of benefits for the maintenance technician. Number one is that the adoption of sequential function chart as a language for top-level sequencing of a machine makes it easier for a maintenance technician to be able to go in and look specifically at what was being processed at that particular point in time and begin to hone their troubleshooting down from a monolithic block of code to a specific subset of code that is pertinent at that particular point. I think we expose maintenance technicians to an awful lot of code unnecessarily. Instead, we should concentrate on building bulletproof modular functionality that we know works well in a specific way. And then we only expose maintenance technicians to the interface necessary to use that functionality. So now all of a sudden we've got a technician that sees a function block that says, 'If you provide me with these four pieces of specific information, I will give you these two pieces of output information only. You have no reason to go inside this code to see how I accomplish this. You know that if I don't give you this output it's because you didn't get one of these four inputs correctly or in the right time.'