Increasing flexibility and functionality in industrial process control: The helpful usage of models, services and cybernetic principles

Modern process control systems are enormous powerful. Even very complex and computationally intensive functions can be realized within these systems. From the system point of view it is possible to implement in parallel all the optimization-, control-, supervisory- or assistance-functions which seems to be helpful for the operator to do his job. The limiting factors today are the required engineering and maintenance costs. Additionally the assurance of the software quality gets critical due to the mass of manually engineered software and the increasing complexity. Reengineering processes, necessary to adapt the software to changes in the functional requirements, products or in the plant-design, become a nightmare and often result in a throw-away of all add-on functions. On the other hand side we need and want all these helpful functions. To overcome the dilemma new software concepts for process control systems are needed. In this paper concepts will be presented which seems to be promising approaches.