AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE RELEVANCE OF DOCUMENTATION FOR PROBLEM SOLVING IN EQUIPMENT CONTROLLED BY PROGRAMMABLE LOGIC CONTROLLERS (PLCS)

An industry survey has identified a lack of support documentation for Programmable Controlled equipment in the manufacturing sector. To assess the relevance of documentation for problem solving on such equipment a series of experiments were carried out. The experiments tested the relevance of concise as against indifferent documentation for hardware and software maintenance. The results were stark– effective documentation leads to faster solutions to hardware and software issues.