Integrated Industrial Control Developmental Concepts

Many existing industrial management and control systems are not based on an integrated systems concept. This is largely due to the fact that the production control systems have been developed independently and separately from the management systems. The local control systems aimed at monitoring technological units or transport facilities have virtually no links with the management information systems designed for inventory control, planning and dispatch of production. This failure to exploit the potential power of applied systems analysis is caused, on the one hand, by the complexity of the integrated problem and the lack of general concepts and approaches to its solution. At the same time the people who have developed such limited systems have extremely detailed but narrow experience. To create a process control system, a deep knowledge of the technology is required and these systems are usually designed to make full use of technological equipment. In developing managerial systems, specialists in management, organization, and planning are required, who have a deep understanding of the specific features for the given plant, and experience of its general environment

An Integrated Control System for a Chemical Plant

This paper is intended to submit general ideas concerning an integrated automatic control system for an industrial plant with continuous technological processes, essentially in the chemical industry. This paper also attempts to present important stages of automation evolution in chemistry and general principles of integrated systems. Taking as an example a large-scale structure of the integrated automatic control system (IACS) for a large chemical complex, the methodology of its development is presented. This paper has a descriptive character and the terminology used here may be considered debatable

Temporal Hierarchy of Decision Making to Manage the Production System

The problem considered here is that of managing and controlling the industrial system to achieve efficient performance. Emphasis is placed on structuring the decision making and control functions, taking into account the fact that the production process runs continuously with no starting or end point, and undergoes major changes in product specifications, quality requirements, equipment characteristics, resource availability, and the like. Since all these changes are time functions, the time factor plays a very important role in decision making and control and in functional structuring. It is shown that the functional structure is a multilevel hierarchical mode with horizontal and vertical decomposition planes. The vertical planes represent temporal decomposition, reflecting the subordination of decision making and control for each time duration or time horizon. The horizontal planes form layers related to each time horizon and consist of the set of decomposed subproblems to be solved in coordinated mode. The philosophy of this functional hierarchical structure is discussed and some motivation for time horizon estimation is given

Preliminary Draft Report: State-of-the-Art Review of Integrated Systems Control in the Steel Industry

This is a preliminary draft version of the report to be issued on the "State-of-the-Art of Integrated Systems Control in the Steel Industry". The draft is incomplete and not necessarily in final form. Its purpose is to provide background material for the IIASA Conference on "Integrated Systems Control in the Steel Industry" scheduled for 30 June to 2 July, 1975. A second purpose is to motivate feedbacks concerning omissions and additions generated by respondents and Conference participants which may be incorporated into the final 'report

Systems Analysis Applied to Hot Strip Production

This paper is an attempt to apply systems analysis to the formulation of problems, and to the generation of new methods for overcoming technological limitations, in order to obtain better quality strips and higher productivity in the hot strip mill. Most of the new ideas and methods of mill control described here have not been implemented or even tried in practice; however, computer simulations of the proposed rolling process, using new control methods, are shown to lead to significantly increased efficiency

Integrated Systems Control in the Steel Industry. State-of-the-Art Review and Proceedings of the Conference June 30-July 2, 1975

Integrated systems control has as its goal the integration of the information processing, decision-making and control functions of an industrial system to achieve increased operating efficiency and productivity, better utilization of resources, improved product quality and other benefits. As the steel industry is well advanced, relative to other industries, in the application of highly computerized systems integration, it was selected as the basis for a first case study. The Review presents both the results of a state-of-the-art survey of integrated systems control in the steel industry and the proceedings of a IIASA conference on the subject. The results motivate a general methodology for integrated control system design based on a hierarchical structuring of the system, incorporating multilevel decomposition and temporal and functional multilayer concepts