US Patent Issued to Siemens on March 31 for "PLC-based support for zero-downtime upgrades of control functions" (German Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 31 -- United States Patent no. 12,591,427, issued on March 31, was assigned to Siemens AG (Munich).

"PLC-based support for zero-downtime upgrades of control functions" was invented by Steffen Klepke (Munich) and Michael Elting (Nuremberg, Germany).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A method and arrangement for upgrading a function performed on a technical system including a PLC and an actuator controlled by the PLC. The control function provides an output which controls the actuator. The method includes deploying at least one updated version of the control function on the system while maintaining the current version of the control function on the system, b. the updated versi...