Child Projects

Movicon allows you to structure a project by decentralizing resources to other projects, known as Child Projects by creating dynamic Parent-child relationships to allow you to distribute your main project application.

Movicon offers a powerful and innovative feature called "Child Projects" to help you deal with the challenges of design engineering supervision systems. "Child Projects" are normal Movicon projects which are linked to a parent project in a  "Parent-Child" relationship inheriting structures and data from the parent while also allowing for specific configurations or modifications to function independently. In this "Parent-Child relationshiop, the Parent project will be able to contain all the Child project's resources as if they were its own.

Parent-Child project relationships offer many advantages when designing supervision and control applications.  The key advantages are described below:

Distributed Projects

Projects structured with Parent-Child relationships provide many advantages to companies working in teams. As a difference to the traditional technologies that only allow team members to use the one same project to work and share different tasks, Movicon offers the possibility to distribute the different tasks into sub-projects know as Child projects to allow team members to work independently on the task they have been assigned while having the ability to collaborate with the others on their team. In this type of scenario, the Team Leader will have all the resources of its members' Child Projects in their own Parent Project while being able to work independently on their own at the same time.

The Parent Project will be configured to contain all its team members' child project resources internally, without any distinction or duplication of the resources' names which will be established by the path of the individual child project.  For instance, a VAR0001 may co-exist in both the parent and child projects by being identified by the project's name and path.

• Note: This architecture provides the option to automatically start the child projects up in runtime when the Parent project is starts up in Runtime.  This option can be found in the Project's "Child Project Options Settings" properties.

A traditional Project team structure diagram

A distributed project structure diagram of  Parent-Child project relationships

Distributed Run

The Parent-Child Project relationship is very handy to use in modular systems or  machines  where, for instance, the plant is divided into zones which can also run independently from one to another. In a situation like this, you can create more projects, one for each zone, and then integrate them into one Parent project from which you can access the pages and the variables of each zone as Child projects.

Example:

An automation line is composed of 3 independent machines. Each machine has its own project run locally on its PC. The machines are then integrated into a production line and linked to a main Supervision PC.

One of the key advantages of using Movicon is that it not only saves you a significant reduction in time developing but it offers the possibility to create a main supervision project such as the "Parent Project" and three "Child Projects" to represent the three individual machines, which reside on local PCs.

In this way, the Parent project can automatically be provided with all the individual variables of the various child projects, to produce general summaries using screen layouts.  By using these general layout screens, which reside in the Parent project, you will only need to open the one referring to the individual machine you wish to view by simply opening the Child project, which resides locally in the machines' PC, in the Parent project. Another advantage you will gain in addition to saving time will be to have all modifications executed on the individual machines will automatically be reported to the main supervisor as well.

• Note: In the example indicated for this architecture, the automatic child project startup with the Parent project run startup, option provided in the Project "Child Project Options Settings" properties, is not required (being independent projects). However, the child projects must be entered with the Server project's (Supervisor) IP address in their settings.

This figure illustrates an automation system composed of one Server project (Supervisor) being the "Parent Project" of three individual local machine projects  being the "Child Projects"

Client-Server with Child Projects

When needing to create a speedier Networking Client-Server system in which a <n> of identical Client projects are present and connected to the Server station, you can apply the same techniques used to create Parent-Child projects to create Client projects in PCs distributed on a network.  This will allow any modifications to the Server project to be made immediately available in each one of the Client projects.   

This is simply done by using an empty 'Parent' project without any local project resources to create a Client project which will become the 'Server' project.   

When creating the Child project to become the Server project, you should configure the "Child Project Options" by entering the IP Address or the Name of the Server in the "Network Server" property only.  Once doing this, the Child project will automatically become a Networking project: the Child project resources (Drivers, Alarms, Data Logger/Recipes for example) will be disabled while the Variables and the Window, Grid and Trend objects will connect in Network.

More specifically, the Child project may be a physical copy of the Server project in the Client PC (for example in cases where the LAN network is slow) or retrieved in net directly on the Server as  a Link (if the LAN network is fast enough).  In addition, to allowing the same identical Client Project on any network PC, the latter configuration also allows the software to be centralized in a way that the Client will always be updated automatically whenever any variation occures in the Server project.

Client-Server structure with Parent (Client) - Child (Server) relationship

• Within this context, it is important to specify that the number of ports set in the parent project's networking service are different from those set for the child projects.  In addition, the ports are also different for each child project.  For example, if you have two Child projects called project 'A' and project 'B',  project 'A' should be set in the Port with the 12233 value, and project 'B' should be set in the Port with the 12234 value, while the Parent project should be set in the Port with the 12235 value.  It is also important to take into consideration that the Server projects corresponding to the various child projects must be set with the same value of that of the port set for the various Clients.  Therefore, as in our example, the Server of project 'A' would be set in the Port with the 12233 value and the Server of project 'B' would be set in the Port with the 12234 value.  This  procedure is essential to use to prevent connection problems not only between the various Clients and their respective Servers but also between eventual Web Clients and Network Clients connecting to the Parent project.  If a Child project screen is opened from the Parent project, and since the variables of that screen have to be connected to the network Server set in the Child project's properties, Movicon will startup the network services for that child project.  If the Child project uses the same ports used by the Parent project hosting it, conflicts will inevitably occur in the ports that are opened in listening mode.

• In cases where the "Password Management" is enabled in the Server project,  each Client must be authenticated in the Server project to allow variables and data to be exchanged in Networking.  This will also applywhen the local Client project's (in the Parent Project) 'Password Management', for accessing resources protected with a Password level that does not equal zero, can be enabled/disabled locally in the Client project. Therefore, when starting up the Client, it's authentication on the Server must be performed in the Child Project by setting a user in the "Users" property in the Child Project's 'Networking - Client Settings' property group.  This user will then be used for authenticating the variable networking function and also for various  Movicon windows such as the 'Alarm Window', 'Historical Log Viewer', 'Scheduler Viewer' and 'Data Logger Viewer'.