Control and communication mechanisms in distributed control application platform

The changing world market requirements and perspective drives the need for new approaches and models to the development of distributed control applications. An advanced industrial automation system is becoming increasingly sophisticated with multiple levels of control and automation. A distributed control application platform was designed [Chen, IM (2001)]. The control and communication mechanism for implementation of a distributed control application platform (DCAP) is detailed. Function block (FB) based control mechanism was highlighted for the implementation of control applications. Three types of communication methods were identified to provide data exchange channels for long-term history information, short-term and real-time data between CAs. The standard communication interfaces to field devices and other industrial standard system were implemented.