Using OPC Technology to Study Advanced Process Control [technical]

The post Using OPC Technology to Study Advanced Process Control [technical] first appeared on the ISA Interchange blog site.

This post is an excerpt from the journal ISA Transactions. All ISA Transactions articles are free to ISA members, or can be purchased from Elsevier Press.

Abstract: OPC, originally the object linking and embedding (OLE) for process control, brings a broad communication opportunity between different kinds of control systems. This paper investigates the use of OPC technology for the study of distributed control systems (DCS) as a cost-effective and ﬂexible research tool for the development and testing of advanced process control (APC) techniques in university research centers. Co-simulation environment based on Matlab, LabVIEW and TCP/IP network is presented here. Several implementation issues and OPC based client/server control application have been addressed for TCP/IP network. A nonlinear boiler model is simulated as OPC server and OPC client is used for closed loop model identiﬁcation, and to design a model predictive controller. The MPC is able to control the NOx emissions in addition to drum water level and steam pressure.

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Source: ISA News