What are the characteristics of DCS?

Reliability is the life of DCS development. There are three main measures to ensure the high reliability of DCS: first, widely use high reliability hardware equipment and production technology; Second, redundancy technology is widely used; Thirdly, the fault-tolerant technology, fault self-diagnosis and automatic processing technology of the system are widely realized in the software design. The MTBF of most distributed control systems today can reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of hours.

The system functions are developing towards openness. The traditional DCS structure is closed, and it is difficult to be compatible between DCS from different manufacturers. Open DCS will give users greater autonomy in system integration, and users can choose equipment and software resources from different manufacturers to access the control system according to actual needs to achieve the best system integration. This includes not only the integration between DCS and DCS, but also the integration between DCS and PLC, FCS and various control equipment and software resources in a broad sense.

Hardware architecture

Looking at the hierarchical structure of DCS, DCS level and control management level are the two most basic links of DCS.

The process control stage realizes decentralized control functions such as signal input, transformation, operation and output. In different DCS, the control equipment of process control level is different, such as process control unit, field control station and process interface unit. , but their structural forms are basically the same, and they can be collectively referred to as field control unit FCU.

The process management layer consists of engineer station, operator station and management computer. , to complete the centralized monitoring and management of process control level, usually called operation station. The hardware and software of DCS are designed according to modular structure, so the development of DCS is actually to combine various basic modules provided by the system into a system according to actual needs. This process is called system configuration.