Novel Design of Ubiquitous Data-Centric Automation and Control Architecture

The development of process automation systems has been evolving to raise productivity and enhance plant operation. Their fundamental architecture has advanced from large centralized systems to highly distributed systems; but suffering from three major disadvantages. First is the requirement of extensive premature capital investments for sustaining the systems life cycle. Secondly are the inherent architectural constraints for achieving full utilization of the controllers’ resources. Finally is the inefficient distribution of real-time process data for achieving maximum yield of processing facilities. This paper presents a paradigm shift from the traditional distributed architecture to a ubiquitous data-centric architecture. This is based on distributed autonomous process interface systems, fault-tolerant real-time data distribution service middleware, and virtually clustered servers. Results of detailed performance analysis confirm the viability of the new proposal as the basis for designing an evergreen collaborative automation platform that provides flexibility and economy of scale for maximum systems’ utilization and heterogeneous scalability and compatibility across multiple vendors.