My Distributed Control System 'Wish List'

摘要

Hans Eder has worked for many years in controller troubleshooting, development of advanced controls, and performance analysis on many different systems. Many of the features and functions needed to work effectively are still not available, he says, and so he's created this DCS 'wish list. The first control computer I ever used was a Honeywell 4500 / PMX system which had just 64 k memory! Yet, due to the clever, efficient design of the operating system (Microsoft do you hear me?) this did not prevent us from running dozens of advanced control applications plus several linear programming modules in real time. Operating systems and application software have evolved significantly. But a closer look shows that the main developments were made in the operator interface and in supporting functionality such as alarming, reporting and the like. The 'true' process control functionality, however, has hardly seen any significant evolution at all. For auxiliary functions needed for the building and maintaining of controllers and control schemes, progress has been rather modest.