Scaling OT connectivity

When establishing connectivity to equipment on the factory floor we often see a need for connecting multiple devices of the same type, like PLCs, in multiple locations. Usually, you want to apply the same kind of processing for all the devices but the question is how to design the flow in a way that you don’t end up replicating the same flow several times?

To achieve this we have introduced the possibility to automatically disable industrial connector modules when deploying the flow, if they are not configured with a valid IP address. To adapt the flow for each deployment you will then set the IP addresses using parameters.

The idea is to design the flow for the greatest number of devices that you want to connect in one flow, let’s say 3 since you have 3 times the same PLC in factory A, but only 2 times in factory B. In that case, set up the flow with 3 industrial connectors - using ‘S7 Reader’ as an example.

Your flow would look something like this:

In this example you would create parameters, i.e. PLC_1_IP, PLC_2_IP, PLC3_IP. On the node in factory A you assign values for all three parameters, while on the node in factory B you only assign values for PLC_1_IP and PLC_2_IP. As a result, all PLC modules will be enabled when the flow is deployed in factory A, while in factory B the module PLC_3 will be disabled.

In this way you only have to maintain one flow which is used on different Nodes with different amounts of connectors active.

This approach can be combined with the ‘Data Driven Processing’ concept to create even more unified flows and to keep track of the data source while processing.