Industrial Control Applications Research Articles

Standardized Dynamic Reconfiguration of Control Applications in Industrial Systems

Industrial areas like manufacturing, logistics and power systems require highly flexible and adaptable control solutions in order to fulfill future requirements. An industrial automation system has to provide technologies, concepts and mechanisms allowing the adaption of control logic during operation. Proper engineering approaches as well as execution environments with dynamic reconfiguration capabilities are needed to turn this vision into reality. This article provides an overview of applying the IEC 61499 reference model for distributed automation as basis for a standard-compliant reconfigurable method in industrial environments. It covers the modeling and engineering of reconfiguration applications and their execution on distributed embedded controllers using IEC 61499. This approach significantly increases engineering efficiency and reuse in component-based design of industrial automation and control applications. A special focus of this contribution is the discussion of implemented industrial use cases from the manufacturing, robotics and power systems domain.

Reset law design based on robust model predictive strategy for uncertain systems

In a continuous time control system, if some of the controller states are reset, certain limitations on the system response can be removed. Moreover, the stability and performance of such a reset control system may be improved. Resetting action has two main characteristics which should be determined: (a) when the controller states are reset and (b) how the after reset values of the controller states are determined. By defining a reset set, when the system states enter this set, the instants for the controller states reset, can be determined. This paper addresses the second question on how to determine the after reset values. In order to design a reset law for real time applications, a model predictive strategy is proposed that specifies the after reset values by minimizing a quadratic performance index. The quadratic minimization problem is converted to a LMI formulation and the reset law is determined by solving this LMI optimization problem at certain reset times. This approach is applied to a typical CSTR system to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for industrial process control application.

Algorithm and intelligent tutoring system design for programmable controller programming

Programmable logic controllers (PLC) are used for many industrial process control applications. Learning to write ladder logic programs for PLC control is an important and challenging task. However, the learning of ladder logic is often hindered by limited PLC availability due to expensive lab setup, limited lab time, and high student/instructor ratios. With the help of the internet, teaching is not constrained in the traditional classroom pedagogy; the instructors can put the course material on the website and allow the students go on to the course webpage as an alternative way to learn the domain knowledge. However, there is no interaction between the users and learning materials; so, the learning efficiency is often limited. The problem here is how to design a web-based system that is intelligent and adaptive enough to teach the students domain knowledge in PLC. In this research, we proposed a system architecture which combines the pre-test, cased-based reasoning (i.e., heuristic functions), tutorials and tests of the domain concepts, and post-test (i.e., including pre- and post-exam) to customize students' needs according to their knowledge levels and help them learn the PLC concepts, effectively. We have developed an intelligent tutoring system which is mainly based on the feedback and learning preference of the users' questionnaires. It includes many pictures, colorful diagrams, and interesting animations (i.e., switch control of the user's rung configuration) to attract the users' attention. From the model simulation results, a knowledge proficiency effect occurs on problem solving time. If the students are more knowledgeable about PLC concepts, they will take less time to complete problems than those who are not as proficient. Additionally, from the system experiments, the results indicate that the learning algorithm in this system is robust enough to pinpoint the most accurate error pattern (i.e., almost 90 % accuracy of mapping to the most similar error pattern), and the adaptive system will have a higher accuracy of discerning the error patterns which are close to the answers of the PLC problems when the databases have more built-in error patterns. The participant evaluation indicates that after using this system, the users will learn how to solve the problems and have a much better performance than before.

Advanced Data Communications for Downhole Data Logging and Control Applications in the Oil Industry

We present details of 'Mercury', a high-speed downhole communications system that utilizes the (metallic) wall of a gas or oil pipeline or a drill 'string' as the communications 'channel' to control or monitor equipment or sensors used in the oil industry. Conventional downhole communication systems typically use 'mud pulse' telemetry for 'Measurement While Drilling' (MWD) operations. Current mud pulse telemetry technology offers bandwidths of up to 40 bit/s. However the data rate drops with increasing length of the wellbore and is typically as low as 1.5 bit/s – 3.0 bit/s at a depth of 35,000 ft. – 40,000 ft. The system described, by contrast, offers data rates of several megabits per second over distances of many kilometres and uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) coupled with Wideband Frequency Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA). This paper presents details of our system; results of several trials undertaken on actual gas pipelines in the UK will be presented at the Conference.

Efficient Protocols for Secure Broadcast in Controller Area Networks

Controller Area Network is a bus commonly used by controllers inside vehicles and in various industrial control applications. In the past controllers were assumed to operate in secure perimeters, but today these environments are well connected to the outside world and recent incidents showed them extremely vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To withstand such threats, one can implement security in the application layer of CAN. Here we design, refine and implement a broadcast authentication protocol based on the well known paradigm of using key-chains and time synchronization, a commonly used mechanism in wireless sensor networks, which allows us to take advantage from the use of symmetric primitives without the need of secret shared keys during broadcast. But, as process control is a time critical operation we make several refinements in order to improve on the authentication delay. For this we study several trade-offs to alleviate shortcomings on computational speed, memory and bandwidth up to the point of using reduced versions of hash functions that can assure ad hoc security. To prove the efficiency of the protocol we provide experimental results on two representative microcontrollers from the market: a Freescale S12X and an Infineon TriCore, both devices were specifically chosen as they are located somewhat on the extremes of computational power.

Adaptive speed control based on just-in-time learning technique for permanent magnet synchronous linear motor

In this paper, an adaptive two degrees of freedom (2Dof) PI controller based on a just-in-time learning (JITL) method is proposed for predictive speed control of permanent magnet synchronous linear motor (PMSLM). Firstly, to guarantee the high identification accuracy and high real-time performance simultaneously, an improved JITL method is proposed to estimate the controlled model parameters of speed control system. Then, based on the dynamic controlled model, a simplified generalized predictive control (GPC) supplies a 2Dof proportional integral (PI) controller with suitable control parameters to follow a sinusoid-type speed command in operating conditions. The main motivation of this paper is the extension of the predictive controller to replace traditional PI controller in industrial applications. Finally, the efficacy and usefulness of the proposed controller are verified through the experimental results.

Recent advances in mid- and near-infrared spectroscopy with applications for research and teaching, focusing on petrochemistry and biotechnology relevant products

Mid- and near-infrared spectroscopy is introduced as a versatile analytical method for characterizing liquid and solid chemicals as obtained from petrochemistry and biotechnology processes. Besides normal transmission measurements, special equipment with silver halide fiber-optic probes allowing efficient analysis based on mid-infrared attenuated total reflection, and an accessory for near-infrared diffuse reflection measurements, are presented. The latter technique can be used advantageously for powdered samples such as microalgae biomass and polysaccharides, as well as for different tissues such as meat samples. The advantages and disadvantages of both methods, which can be used for industrial process monitoring and chemical quality control applications, are discussed, and have been used in several research projects of BSc students within their degree course of bio- and nano-technologies of our University of Applied Sciences.

LABVIEW SIMULATION FOR SPEED CONTROL OF INDUCTION MOTOR

Today's Industrial Control Applications are done by Remote Process only. Lab VIEW Software plays major role in Industrial Monitoring and control systems. In this paper i am going to discuss about Lab View based induction motor drive control system. It is One of the most common applications required in remote control and monitoring. Drive control system has various types of controller, in order to perform some actions such as control the speed, forward and reverse turning direction of the motor. This approach can be done by Lab VIEW programming, and with the rise of the technology, Ethernet module will be used in order to achieve the remote control system. Lab VIEW is a human machine interfaces design software that is user friendly. It can be easily communicate with different hardware.

Research on Software Architecture of the Design and Development of the Computer System on the Basis of Industrial Process Control

The industrial production of each link has widespread application of industrial process control in the computer system, the reliability and openness of the hardware equipment and hardware system should be ensured in the industrial process control computer system, implement rational software system architecture design should also be ensured, which plays a key role in the guarantee of the advancement and practicability of the system.

Combining shearography and interferometric fringe projection in a single device for complete control of industrial applications

Noncontact optical measurement methods are essential tools in many industrial and research domains. A family of new noncontact optical measurement methods based on the polarization states splitting technique and monochromatic light projection as a way to overcome ambient lighting for in-situ measurement has been developed. Recent works on a birefringent element, a Savart plate, allow one to build a more flexible and robust interferometer. This interferometer is a multipurpose metrological device. On one hand the interferometer can be set in front of a charge-coupled device (CCD) camera. This optical measurement system is called a shearography interferometer and allows one to measure microdisplacements between two states of the studied object under coherent lighting. On the other hand, by producing and shifting multiple sinusoidal Young’s interference patterns with this interferometer, and using a CCD camera, it is possible to build a three-dimensional structured light profilometer.

Guest Editorial Special Section on Industrial Control Applications of FPGAs

Since Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology has emerged in the mid-80s, it made significant progress in many aspects related to performance and efficiency. The density increase of the FPGA's internal resources has also allowed integrating several processor cores within a single component, leading to (Multiple Programmable) System-on-Chip designs. In 2011, Monmasson et al. [IEEE Ind. Electron. Mag., vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 14-26, Mar. 2011] discussed the potential benefits of an FPGA-based controller compared to a standard software solution, from the final industrial application perspective. The paper demonstrates that a single chip reconfigurable hardware platform can constitute a solution which addresses the main control challenges posed by power electronic and drive applications. Some of these challenges are: i) handling capability for the inherent parallelism of multilevel and interleaved power converter structures; ii) design a quasi-analog controller with no computational delay; iii) ensure a perfect synchronism between several required sampling actions; iv) enhance the sampling rate of a regulation; and v) include additional tasks to the embedded controller (such as prediction, health monitoring and diagnosis). This Special Section on Industrial Control Applications of FPGAs of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS constitutes a fresh opportunity to collate research papers summarizing novel solutions to the aforementioned challenges, resulting from the ongoing intensive research carried out by the industrial electronics community. After a thorough review process 13 papers were finally selected. They are classified by main topic of interest into three groups: i) drive applications; ii) power electronic applications; and iii) design methods. These papers are briefly summarized.

Research on Communication Design of Modular Production System

Touch screen is monitoring equipment used in industrial field, whose applications in industrial control will be more and more widely. With the continuous development of PC technology, the traditional man-machine interface will gradually be replaced by the man-machine interface as touch screen and so on. This paper studies structure and function of modular production system (MPS). It emphasizes on how MPS is reformed based on EV touch screen configuration and PROFIBUS-DP Field Bus. S7-300PLC as master communications with S7-200 PLCS through PROFIBUS-DP Field Bus and touch screen communications with S7-300PLC through the MPI adapter constitutes a control network. The touch screen is configured by EV5000 Configuration software, to complete the dynamic process monitoring of MPS system module, and improve the monitoring software so that it will have a simple user login management, production management, production information display and alarm functions.

Adaptive fuzzy identification and predictive control for industrial processes

This paper proposes a method for adaptive identification and control for industrial applications. The learning of a T–S fuzzy model is performed from input/output data to approximate unknown nonlinear processes by a hierarchical genetic algorithm (HGA). The HGA approach is composed by five hierarchical levels where the following parameters of the T–S fuzzy system are learned: input variables and their respective time delays, antecedent fuzzy sets, consequent parameters, and fuzzy rules. In order to reduce the computational cost and increase the algorithm’s performance an initialization method is applied on HGA. To deal with nonlinear plants and time-varying processes, the T–S fuzzy model is adapted online to maintain the quality of the identification/control. The identification methodology is proposed for two application problems: (1) the design of data-driven soft sensors, and (2) the learning of a model for the Generalized predictive control (GPC) algorithm. The integration of the proposed adaptive identification method with the GPC results in an effective adaptive predictive fuzzy control methodology. To validate and demonstrate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed methodologies, they are applied on identification of a model for the estimation of the flour concentration in the effluent of a real-world wastewater treatment system; and on control of a simulated continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) and on a real experimental setup composed of two coupled DC motors. The results are presented, showing that the developed evolving T–S fuzzy model can identify the nonlinear systems satisfactorily and it can be used successfully as a prediction model of the process for the GPC controller.

Upgrade of a multi-channel active noise control system for an industrial stack

Active noise control has been studied in the 1990s as an innovative way to reduce the noise in specific situations. Some applications are well known today and found commercial success like noise-canceling headphones. However, the use of active noise control in industrial applications is more complex, thus being an uncommon solution in this field. The use of active noise control for industrial stack noise is one of these applications. One of the first large-scale implementation has been set up at the end of the 1990s. This system was a 10-channel active noise control system installed on a 1.8 m wide chimney to attenuate a 320 Hz pure tone. At that time, an 8 dB noise reduction was achieved at error microphones. Fifteen years later, it has been decided to upgrade the system with the latest generation of digital signal processor (DSP) allowing a real-time optimization and better tracking speed. This paper describes the overall system and the updated multi-channel active noise controller developed for this application. It also presents the improvements, the achieved noise reduction, and the associated environmental benefits.

Design and application of a real-time industrial Ethernet protocol under Linux using RTAI

Nowadays, Ethernet networks have been extended down into the field of automation control from the upper planning and scheduling level, which caused the generation of a new form of communication using real-time industrial Ethernet fieldbus. This paper presents a feasible Ethernet-based real-time feildbus scenario for industrial automation control systems. It endeavours to gain high performance in general synchronisation real-time control systems with common hardware and software resources. For this purpose, a master-slave pattern is adopted in constructing the communication protocol. The slave nodes are developed based on universal FPGA and ARM chips, and the first slave node is in charge of precise cyclic timing and synchronisation among all slave nodes with time resolution of 20 nanoseconds. The master protocol stack is developed under Linux using Real Time Application Interface (RTAI), which not only provides application interface for user programs but also is responsible for exchanging process data with slave nodes in real time. A case study of merging this fieldbus into EMC2 to control a three-axis milling machine is also discussed and implemented. The experiment results show that this industrial Ethernet fieldbus platform completely meets the demand of open industrial automation control application.

Design and Implement a Digital H∞ Robust Controller for a MW-Class PMSG-Based Grid-Interactive Wind Energy Conversion System

A digital H∞ controller for a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) based wind energy conversion system (WECS) is presented. Wind energy is an uncertain fluctuating resource which requires a tight control management. So, it is still an exigent task for the control design engineers. The conventional proportional-integral (PI) control is not ideal during high turbulence wind velocities, and the nonlinear behavior of the power converters. These are raising interest towards the robust control concepts. The robust design is to find a controller, for a given system, such that the closed-loop system becomes robust that assurance high-integrity and fault tolerant control system, robust H∞ control theory has befallen a standard design method of choice over the past two decades in industrial control applications. The robust H∞ control theory is also gaining eminence in the WECS. Due to the implementation complexity for the continuous H∞ controller, and availability of the high speedy micro-controllers, the design of a sample-data or a digital H∞ controller is very important for the realistic implementation. But there isn’t a single research to evaluate the performance of the digital H∞ controller for the WECS. In this paper, the proposed digital H∞ controller schemes comprise for the both generator and grid interactive power converters, and the control performances are compared with the conventional PI controller and the fuzzy controller. Simulation results confirm the efficacy of the proposed method Energies 2013, 6 2085 which are ensured the WECS stabilities, mitigate shaft stress, and improving the DC-link voltage and output power qualities.

On replacing PID controller with ANN controller for DC motor position control

The process industry implements many techniques with certain parameters in its operations to control the working of several actuators on field. Amongst these actuators, DC motor is a very common machine. The angular position of DC motor can be controlled to drive many processes such as the arm of a robot. The most famous and well known controller for such applications is PID controller. It uses proportional, integral and derivative functions to control the input signal before sending it to the plant unit. In this paper, another controller based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) control is examined to replace the PID controller for controlling the angular position of a DC motor to drive a robot arm. Simulation is performed in MATLAB after training the neural network (supervised learning) and it is shown that results are acceptable and applicable in process industry for reference control applications. The paper also indicates that the ANN controller can be less complicated and less costly to implement in industrial control applications as compared to some other proposed schemes.

Monitoring the covariance matrix via penalized likelihood estimation

In many industrial multivariate quality control applications, based on the engineering and operational understanding of how the process works, when the process variability is out of control it is typically the case that changes only occur in a small number of elements in the covariance matrix. Under such a premise, we propose a new Phase II Shewhart chart for monitoring changes in the covariance matrix of a multivariate normal process. The new control chart is essentially based on calculating the likelihood ratio of testing the hypothesis that the in-control covariance matrix is equal to a known covariance matrix, where the unknown covariance matrix that appears in the likelihood ratio is replaced by an estimate obtained from a penalized likelihood function. The penalized likelihood function is derived by adding an L 1 penalty function to the usual likelihood. The performance of the proposed chart is evaluated based on simulations and compared with that of several existing Shewhart charts for monitoring the covariance matrix. The simulation results indicate that the proposed chart outperforms existing charts. A real example from the semiconductor industry is presented and analyzed using the proposed chart and other existing charts. Potential future research directions are also discussed.

Evaluating the Impact of Thermal Noise on AODV, DSDV and DSR Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Because of their good support and easy deployment, wireless ad-hoc networks are currently widely being used for many industrial or military applications. Like other communication networks, environmental conditions can have considerable impact on the performance of wireless ad-hoc networks. Temperature is a good example which results in thermal agitation of the charge carriers. Consequently, we should be able to precisely estimate the performance of these networks in various environmental conditions to see whether they satisfy our expectations or not before any deployment. Investigating the effect of Thermal noise on the routing performance of Wireless Ad-hoc Networks is something never done before. This paper evaluates the impact of Thermal noise on the routing capability of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs); which are a kind of Wireless ad-hoc Networks; in existence of thermal noise. The results can be a useful guidance for outdoor implementation of MANETs for industrial process automation and control applications.

Adaptive controller for the double‐sided linear switched reluctance motor based on the nonlinear inductance modelling

A linear switched reluctance motor (LSRM) is an attractive candidate for high-precision position control applications in industry. Compared to its single-sided counterpart, a double-sided LSRM (DLSRM) has a more propulsion force to mass ratio and normal force can be counteracted from serially connected excitation windings and a symmetric machine structure. In this study, a nonlinear inductance modelling method is proposed by introducing a K factor that reflects both current and position effect on inductance. Considering uncertainties and disturbances from the DLSRM-based motion system, this study implements online parameter estimation with adaptive control strategy to detect system parameter variations and regulate control parameters in real time. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed control method is capable of position tracking with the desired performance and adaptive to operational changes either under command signal variations or external disturbances. These results prove the effectiveness of the proposed control method for high-precision position control of the DLSRM.