Application of Functional Analysis Techniques and Supervision of Thermal Power Plants

Abstract

Supervision consists of commanding a process and supervising its working [1]. To achieve this goal, the supervisory system of a process must collect, supervise and record important sources of data linked to the process, to detect the possible loss of functions and alert the human operator. The main objective of a supervisory system is to give the means to the human operator to control and to command a highly automated process [2]. So, the supervision of industrial processes includes a set of tasks aimed at controlling a process and supervising its operation. An automatic supervisory system is a traditional supervisory system, that is to say, a system which provides a hierarchical list of alarms generated by a simple comparison with regard to thresholds [3]. The information synthesis system manages the presentation of information via any support (synoptic, console, panel, etc.) to the human operator. Today, the supervision of production systems is more and more complex to perform, not only because of the number of variables always more numerous to monitor but also because of the numerous interrelations existing between them, very difficult to interpret when the process is highly automated [4]. The challenge of the future years is based on the design of support systems which let an active part to the supervisory operators by supplying tools and information allowing them to understand the running of production equipment. Indeed, the traditional supervisory systems present many already known problems. First, whereas sometimes the operator is saturated by an information overload, some other times the information under load does not permit them to update their mental model of the supervised process [5]. Moreover, the supervisory operator has a tendency to wait for the alarm to act, instead of trying to foresee or anticipate abnormal states of the system. So, to avoid these perverse effects and to make operator’s work more active, the design of future supervisory systems has to be human centred in order to optimize Man-Machine interactions [6]. It seems in fact important to supply the means to this operator to perform his own evaluation of the process state. To reach this objective, Functional Analysis seems to be a promising research method. In fact, allowing the running of the production equipment to be