As China continues to advance its strategy of becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, and with the continuous introduction of policies by central and local governments to promote advanced manufacturing, the deep integration of technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the industrial internet, and big data is driving the manufacturing sector toward rapid digital transformation and the construction of smart factories. On the industrial floor, industrial control system hardware and software—being closest to underlying equipment—play a crucial role in enabling intelligent manufacturing.

A PLC uses a programmable memory to store instructions for operations such as logic control, sequence control, timing, counting, and arithmetic processing. It controls various types of machinery or production processes through digital or analog inputs and outputs. The basic components of a PLC include a power supply, central processing unit (CPU), memory, input units, output units, and external devices such as programmers and printers.

Future digital factories are structured from top to bottom into the information layer, control layer, drive layer, execution layer, and sensing layer. As the core component of the control layer, PLCs connect upward to the information layer and downward to the drive, execution, and sensing layers. They play a critical role, effectively acting as the “brain” of industrial production systems. Successfully entering the PLC market helps industrial control manufacturers enhance customer stickiness and expand vertically into other industrial automation products.