Engineering Work Station as a Tool for a Process Control Design and Implementation

Abstract

This paper describes the total role of a PC-based Engineering Work Station (EWS) in designing and implementing the control functions for a plant. The plant is controlled, monitored, and managed by a microprocessor-based distributed control system which interfaces with EWS. The steps and procedures of the work is described from control design to the plant start-up. During the design and implementation phase EWS was also used as a personal computer and many off-line calculations were performed. The plant for the work was a chiller system which is part of the power house supplying the steam and chilled water into the chemical and polymer processing plant as well as buildings for heating and cooling. The role of EWS as a significant control design and implementation tool, which received wide acceptance and user’s appeal, has been demonstrated. The main advantages of EWS have been: (i) the ability to configure and edit all control system configurations before installation is complete, (ii) to have on-site permanent drawings of control logics at any time, (iii) to integrate various control symbols and load them onto control modules by operator-friendly softwares, (iv) to monitor the process operation for diagnosis and troubleshooting as a support to the user.