ChatGPT for PLC/DCS Control Logic Generation

Large language models (LLMs) providing generative AI have become popular to support software engineers in creating, summarizing, optimizing, and documenting source code. It is still unknown how LLMs can support control engineers using typical control programming languages in programming tasks. Researchers have explored GitHub CoPilot or DeepMind AlphaCode for source code generation but did not yet tackle control logic programming. The contribution of this paper is an exploratory study, for which we created 100 LLM prompts in 10 representative categories to analyze control logic generation for of PLCs and DCS from natural language. We tested the prompts by generating answers with ChatGPT using the GPT-4 LLM. It generated syntactically correct IEC 61131-3 Structured Text code in many cases and demonstrated useful reasoning skills that could boost control engineer productivity. Our prompt collection is the basis for a more formal LLM benchmark to test and compare such models for control logic generation.