Design And Development Of Monitoring Software Testing Platform For Mineral Process

Mineral industry plays an important part in the national economy, and automatic control applied in mineral production process is the key to improve product quality, save energy and improve efficiency. Automatic control system need to go through a series of time-consuming, laborious and debugging process with risk, especially before the PLC control software has been put into operation. Therefore, in a lab environment, testing PLC control software which can help find errors of PLC control software in advance will make a very important practical significance for shortening debugging time, saving labor investments, reducing debugging risks and costs if we test the controller parameters in laboratory in advance.The monitoring software of mineral automation system is the Human-machine interaction of PLC control software, and its role is to monitor the equipment operational status in the whole process of mineral production, the dynamic parameters in process instrumentation, as well as equipment and loop control operations, and provide alarms and records. According to the National Science and Technology Supporting Program "Advanced Control Technology of Whole production Line of Mineral Processing "(2012BAF19G01), this paper studies the testing methods of PLC monitoring software, especially the process interface, for mineral process, and develops the monitoring software testing platform. The main works of this thesis can be described as follows:1. According to the features of process equipments, long process, large-scale in the mineral process, and based on the detailed analysis of the PLC monitoring software functions, this paper discusses the program errors and testing requirements of PLC process interface in detail.2. According to the system’s I/O channel table and interface design files to design test cases, a test method based on human-machine interaction and black-box testing for analog parameters and device icons is raised. It designs the overall architecture of monitoring software testing platform consisted of hardware and software components, which can achieve semi-automatic testing of analog parameters and device icons of process monitoring software, and it can generate test reports automatically.3. Based on RSView32 PLC software of Rockwell company and using technology of OPC communications and RSView32 software development, it develops a monitoring software testing platform of mineral process for Rockwell PLC system.4. With an iron plant automation engineering PLC software monitoring software as a case, the testing method and the testing platform have been tested. Test results show that by means of this testing platform, developers can quickly identify and locate some PLC software monitoring software errors and defects, which makes a contribution to shortening field debugging time, saving labor investments and reducing debugging risks and costs.