th

THE 8 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON ADVANCED TOPICS IN ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

May 23-25, 2013
Bucharest, Romania

Petri Net versus Ladder Diagram for Controlling a

Process Automation
Valentin NVRPESCU1, Member IEEE, Ioan-Drago DEACONU1, Member IEEE, Aurel-Ionu CHIRIL1, Member IEEE,
Anca-Simona DEACONU
1
PLC Laboratory - Facultatea de Inginerie Electric, Universitatea Politehnica din Bucureti
valentin.navrapescu@gmail.com, dragos.deaconu@gmail.com, aurel.chirila@gmail.com, anca.s.deaconu@gmail.com

Abstract- Industrial automation is constantly expanding, and, a predetermined operating program of the elevator.
regarding their control more and more solutions are presently Depending on the application, the program may be different
developing on the market. These include older methods like
Petri nets (1966), and standardized languages, which are for sure. Examples of usages of such an elevator are the
commonly used in the field of programmable logic controllers operation within a library (take from or put back on the
(PLCs). The paper presents the Ladder Diagram programming shelves the requested books), a restaurant or a hotel (food and
language, that is one of the standardized languages, and one of drink orders and/or laundry transportation), a manufacturing
the most widely used for industrial automation systems. In these unit or a warehouse (for logistic purposes to receive or send
circumstances, it is useful to make a comparison between the
two methods, drawing out the advantages and the disadvantages various parts or packages). A detailed comparison should take
of each solution separately. Petri nets benefit from the existence into account not only the advantages offered by each of the
of a highly developed mathematical support and high flexibility two methods, but also should consider the time required for
in analyzing all elements that can influence the conduct of an the program development, testing and implementation and not
event, which is a major advantage. On the other hand, the lastly the total running time of the program. In the case of an
Ladder Diagram language, which corresponds to the standard
IEC 61131, is easy to use and implement, regardless of the industrial application, whatever the size of the application
hardware structure used by the manufacturer. Also, this method large or small, it is important to evaluate how difficult it is to
allows both ON-line and OFF-line simulations of the automation achieve a maintenance program and hence the operation of
process operation. Finally, an educational platform is also the entire process, the cost generated by this operation, the
presented. total service time, which in fact it is a delay without revenue.
Keywords: PLC, Petri net, Ladder Diagram The application represents the development of the control
for a freight elevator that has to operate on three levels. The
I. INTRODUCTION designed and manufactured educational platform is shown in
The paper aims to analyze two solutions for the control Fig. 1.
design of a process. Due to general applicability of the both
methods to any industrial process automation, as an example
application a freight elevator has been considered.
Automating the process involves actually implementing the
command and the control operation of a freight elevator that
operates between three levels. The application
implementation based on the Ladder Diagram programming
language for a programmable logic controller can be achieved
in two ways [1]. The first method, which is simpler, it is not
necessarily the one that offers the best overall performance.
This consists in the development of the application program
directly into the programming environment. A second
solution is to design and simulate the application operation
using Petri nets [2]. This solution is a very flexible because it
allows for subsequent implementation also using a software
environment in accordance to IEC 61131 standard, being this
either Ladder Diagram, or in some cases Functional Block
Diagram, Instruction List or Structured Text.
II. PROCESS AUTOMATION
Fig. 1. The educational platform for the process automation of an elevator.
For comparison, be it not a throughout comparison, a
freight elevator control has been considered as an automation
At each level there is provided an operator panel consisting
process example. The implementation has been performed for
in push buttons and indicator lamps. On the panel there are

978-1-4673-5980-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE

four push buttons, one for each level and a fourth for stopping
the elevator at any given time moment whatever its current TABLE II
THE REQUIRED OUTPUTS FOR THE COMMAND SYSTEM
position. The three signaling lamps are two (white color) for
OUT 01 Elevator UP
each of the moving directions (up or down) and the third one OUT 02 Elevator DOWN
(red color) it is for signaling that the elevator is in resting OUT 03 Error acoustic/optic signal
state at the exact level where it was supposed to arrive and OUT 04 Elevator is going UP
waiting for a new command. OUT 05 Elevator is going DOWN
OUT 06 Elevator STOPPED

III. LADDER DIAGRAM

This programming language has been derived from the
RLL (Relay Ladder Logic) language. It makes part of the
user-friendly programming languages because it does not
require writing instruction statements or building logic
blocks. It is mainly based on drag-and-drop operation. The
items that are placed represent various specific logic
functions to each programmable logic controllers. In such a
manner, the program for an industrial automation, a
manipulator or for other sequential and/or repetitive operation
of a system it is simply achieved and in little time.
Fig. 2. Reed relay for detecting elevator presence. In Fig. 3 it is presented the first step of the implementation,
which is the selection of the device (the programmable logic
The detection of the elevator position at one of the three controller) that will be used for physically implementation of
levels is achieved using proximity detectors, which are reed the control. The hardware implementation of the control part
relay type. One of such devices found on the actual is depicted in Fig. 4.
educational platform is shown in Fig. 2.
Similar to any freight elevators that have been previously
mentioned, the command can only come outside of the car by
using the momentary push buttons.
In the cases of malfunction, when the car end-position
sensors (highest and lowest levels) are not operating, end-
track sensors are also provided that activate under fault
conditions. Once activated such a sensor, the elevator is
stopped and signaled both visually and acoustically so that a
mechanical maintenance intervention is required. After this
information is collected, the signaling can be canceled but the
Fig. 3. PLC selection for Ladder Diagram implementation.
error signal can be canceled only after the fault has been
remedied, and so, an acknowledgment to the systems has
been given.
In order to fulfill the described operation mode, there are
required a series of inputs for the control system as shown in
Table I. The required outputs for the command system are
described in Table II.

TABLE I
INPUTS FOR THE CONTROL SYSTEM
IN 01 Level Sensor 1
IN 02 Level Sensor 2
IN 03 Level Sensor 3
IN 04 STOP button
IN 05 First level button
IN 06 Second level button
IN 07 Third level button
IN 08 Upper end-track
IN 09 Lower end-track
IN 10 Cancel acoustic/optic signal
IN 11 Cancel error signal Fig. 4. PLC implementation hardware view.
 representation but with the possibility to group together more
Fig. 5 shows a part of the application program. It can be
activities that will form a stage of the application process.
noticed that some lines are colored in red. The red color
The Petri network is an oriented graphical representation.
means that the program is running in OFF-line mode. The
This type of representation of the industrial processes has
major advantage of this method (developing the application
been developed by the German mathematician Carl Adam
program directly in the Ladder Diagram language) is that it
PETRI and it has been presented for the first time in his PhD
allows for quick and easy visual debugging of all possible
thesis held at the Technische Universitt Darmstadt -
malfunctions of the program while this runs in simulation
Germany [4].
mode and thus protecting the real world application from
The nodes of a Petri network represent the stages/states of
programming damages.
the process. The arcs that link the nodes represent the
transitions, and they model the conditions that must be met by
the process in order to move from one stage to another. Such
a network is exemplified in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6. Typical structure of a Petri net.

In Fig. 7 it is depicted the main structure of the application

program. Each rectangle represents the set of conditions that
must be met in order for the system to change its state and
make a transition from one state to another (in the application
given, the elevator will go from one level to another).
Fig. 5. Ladder Diagram implementation.

IV. PETRI NETS

The operational description of a sequential or not
automation process, or of any industrial application, it can be
achieved in several ways. The approach applied depends
directly on the accessible information about and from the
given process. If the process can provide a large amount of
information, then there are the prerequisites to develop a
well-designed and well adapted control schematic that
suffices the recipient demands. Surely this aspect depends on
the designer skills [3].
The control implementation procedure of the automation
process, either hardware or software part, is a very important
task.
Initially, the complete description of a process operation
was performed by a simple written text. A closer approach for
the final objective is to say an engineering approach. Thus,
the description of the process operation is presently achieved
in form of flow charts. One flow chart type is by phase flow
chart. This method is very similar to Sequential Flow Chart
(SFC) language stated in IEC 61131, which is a standard for
programmable logic controllers. Other flow chart types are Fig. 7. Program structure using Petri net.
Petri networks or mathematical description.
While the flow chart is a solution to represent the operation It must not be forgotten that the time, which is a key
of an automation process throughout some independent parameter for many industrial applications, is replaced here
activities, the phase flow chart is a similar graphical by the existing causal dependencies between the various
states of the system during operation.
 The description of all the possible combinations for the
adjacent control signals leads to the generation of a table
called the truth table [5].
The resulting function is minimized and only then it is
implemented and attached to each state of the system. Finally,
the program is run using a control panel like the one depicted
in Fig. 8, and so the simulation of the system real operation
can be observed.
Fig. 8. Control panel of the Petri net simulation.
V. CONCLUSIONS
The application program described in the paper was firstly
developed using the Ladder Diagram language. Then, the
same program was described using Petri nets. After
performing the simulation of the application operation using
Petri nets, the obtained program was also converted to Ladder
Diagram. Thus, some conclusions regarding the best suited
method to be applied for the freight elevator application were
drawn.
Using the first method the following aspects are concluded.
The total implementation time is quite short, including here
all the time required by the OFF-line simulation; the effective
download of the program from the programming computer
into the physical device, i.e. EASY 719 DC-RC, and the
running of the application required about 1-2 seconds. The
changes performed into the program in order to optimize
some issues that were detected only when the real operation
was performed, the retesting procedure in simulation and the
rebuilding, the downloading and the running of the new
version of the program took about a few minutes.
It can be concluded that this first method for solving the
control part of an automation application is simple and does
not require a large amount of time, that is, it can take from
one half a day to only a few days. Talking in percents, this
difference is a major one and it mainly depends on the clarity
of the process operation description and the programmer
skills and experience.
The disadvantage of the method consists in that the
unforeseen errors or malfunctions of the system components
(position sensors, end-track sensors) must be treated
separately and only then included into the application
program.
Regarding the second method, the drawn conclusions are
the following. The total developing time of the program is
considerably much larger, one of the reasons being that the
environments used for Petri nets implementation are not so
user-friendly. In fact, when compared to the first method,
here the expertise of the programmer plays a key role, while
for the Ladder Diagram the programmer is not required to
have environment usage skills. The time required to convert
the Petri net into the Ladder Diagram is short. The possible
changes of the Petri net can lead to serious malfunctions of
the entire net so an important amount of time must be spent to
reanalyze the net operation and so the new command
implementation requires a lot of time.
The main advantage of Petri nets is that although they are
less user-friendly, it allows for a complete and exact
description of the entire process, so that the designers knows
each time what is the current state of the entire system [6],
[7]. For example, when the cabin is at a specific level and it is
required by pressing a push button for the elevator to move to
another level, the first method takes into account only the
state of all the sensors while the second, additionally takes
into account all the possible combinations of all the input
signals (buttons and sensors).
Hence, after the tests and analyses performed it can be
stated that the first method is well suited for simpler
automation processes where the behavior is known and
predictable, while for complex systems (this was not the case
of the considered application) the Petri nets have the
advantage of providing an increased safety because it takes
into account all possible events and routes.
Ultimately, an educational platform has been
manufactured.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The work has been supported by Eaton Electric which
delivered the necessary software packages EASY-Soft, PLC
devices (EASY 719 DC-RC and EASY 400-POW) and
technical support as well. Also it has been co-funded by the
Sectoral Operational Program Human Resources
Development 2007-2013 of the Romanian Ministry of
Labour, Family and Social Protection through the Financial
Agreement POSDRU/107/1.5/S/76903 and
POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62557.
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