Advanced Process Control Systems: The New Heart of the Enterprise Management System

摘要

In the evolution of digital control systems, inherent processing capability has skyrocketed in the last decade. This is due to the availability of the same powerful processors, used in home/office computers, used in these control systems. The processes being controlled are typically field device limited in terms of speed of response; today's processors can provide logic control, I/O scanning and other main functions far faster than the field can respond. This "latent" excess processing capacity within the digital control systems presents opportunities to take on new tasks that now reside in servers or other stand-alone processing devices. Plant performance monitoring, maintenance monitoring, and other asset management functions can now reside fully within the same hardware platform as that being used for actual process control. There is already a body of work within academia that identifies a similar trend (peer-to-peer or grid computing) in latent/underutilized processor capacity within networks that can be harnessed for solving massively complex analysis in many research applications and within various industries. The use of the latent capacity of the DCS in some aspects mirrors the approach within the academic studies. The author show why and how the plant DCS can and should be looked at no longer as simply the implementation of process control logic (optimized by another stand-alone device), but also as the decision-making tools (i.e. software tools) that enhance plant performance, unit dispatch, and other functions that can and should be embedded in the control system itself. This way, operational decision-making (i.e. business decision making) can become far more real time and far more meaningful with the ability to instantly understand the commercial (read profitability) impact.