Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

L. F. Wang received his B.Eng degree in measurement and instrumentation from Zhejiang University, China in 1997, a M.Eng degree in instrumentation science and engineering from Zhejiang University, China in 2000, and a M.Eng degree in electrical and computer engineering from National University of Singapore, Singapore in 2002. Currently he is a researcher in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Virginia, U.S.A. He has published over 40 technical papers in the fields of industrial measurement, testing, and supervision, fault-tolerant control, and autonomous agents. He has served as a technical program committee member for some international conferences. He is also an active reviewer for many leading international journals and conferences. He was “one of the valued and trusted contributors” in AUTOTESTCON 2000. His current research interests include networked and embedded software technology for aerospace applications, and adaptive resource management in real-time systems.

K. C. Tan received the B.Eng. degree with first class honors in electronics and electrical engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He was with the Center for Systems & Control and the Evolutionary Computing Group, Glasgow, Scotland, before joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, as an Assistant Professor in 1997. He has authored or coauthored more than 100 journal and conference publications and has served as a program committee or organizing member for many international conferences. He currently holds Associate Editor appointments in IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and International Journal of Systems Science (Taylor and Francis, London). His current research interests include computational intelligence, evolutionary computing, intelligent control, and engineering designs optimization.

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In industrial settings, using modern technology, machinery, and integrated systems to their maximum potential often depends on well-designed automation software. As tech-nologies continually develop and evolve, practicing engineers and academic researchers must continually develop the software to run these technologies. Modern Industrial Automation Software Design offers readers the critical tools needed to create software that meets today's dynamic industrial challenges.

This up-to-date resource first lays out the knowledge base that allows purposeful and disciplined automation software development. Then, moving from general knowledge to its specific use, the authors discuss five typical applications in real-world industrial automation software design. These include:

• An object-oriented reconfigurable software design
• A flexible measurement point management system
• An automatic blending system using multithreaded programming
• A flexible automatic test system for rotating turbine machinery
• An Internet-based online real-time condition monitoring system

Using this practical, hands-on approach, Modern Industrial Automation Software Design covers important new software innovations, such as:

Modern software engineering * Object-oriented methodology * Visual/graphical programming platforms * Graphical user interfaces * Virtual instrumentation * Component-based systems * Systematic database management * Dynamic data exchange * Software performance testing

Modern Industrial Automation Software Design brings together multiple disciplines into a cutting-edge reference suitable not only for students and practitioners of industrial measurement and control, but also for the general reader interested in new prospects for industrial production and management.

Aus dem Klappentext

In industrial settings, using modern technology, machinery, and integrated systems to their maximum potential often depends on well-designed automation software. As tech-nologies continually develop and evolve, practicing engineers and academic researchers must continually develop the software to run these technologies. Modern Industrial Automation Software Design offers readers the critical tools needed to create software that meets today's dynamic industrial challenges.

This up-to-date resource first lays out the knowledge base that allows purposeful and disciplined automation software development. Then, moving from general knowledge to its specific use, the authors discuss five typical applications in real-world industrial automation software design. These include:

• An object-oriented reconfigurable software design
• A flexible measurement point management system
• An automatic blending system using multithreaded programming
• A flexible automatic test system for rotating turbine machinery
• An Internet-based online real-time condition monitoring system

Using this practical, hands-on approach, Modern Industrial Automation Software Design covers important new software innovations, such as:

Modern software engineering * Object-oriented methodology * Visual/graphical programming platforms * Graphical user interfaces * Virtual instrumentation * Component-based systems * Systematic database management * Dynamic data exchange * Software performance testing

Modern Industrial Automation Software Design brings together multiple disciplines into a cutting-edge reference suitable not only for students and practitioners of industrial measurement and control, but also for the general reader interested in new prospects for industrial production and management.

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Modern Industrial Automation Software Design

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

In the past years before the personal computer (PC) was widely incorporated into industrial automation systems, all the faults that occurred in industrial processes were checked and dealt with by trained or experienced operators. For example, in the condition monitoring systems for the natural gas pipeline network, all operations were handled in a manual or semiautomatic manner, which, however, had some major drawbacks. For instance, the operator had to do the majority of the work by hand, the abnormal conditions could not be monitored and handled in real time, the remote measurement parameters could not be effectively monitored, and operators were prone to make mistakes in recording and manipulating a large amount of data. Therefore, it is highly necessary to automate the measurement operations as well as to improve the operating efficiency.

In recent decades, this picture has been dramatically changed due to the wide adoption of industrial PC in a wide range of industrial applications. A typical industrial automation system, as illustrated in Fig. 1.1, is usually made up of the physical system, transducers, device drivers and data 1/O, host computer, network server, and remote computers.

Information technologies have been rapidly developed in recent years, and they have provided sufficient technical support for building modern industrial automation systems with more open architecture with respect to the previous ones. It turns out that the computerized real-time monitoring analysis and automated technologies can realize the full automation of an industrial measurement system. The combination of emerging information technologies with traditional condition monitoring systems allows for the continuous running status monitoring for essential equipment as well as comprehensive data processing and centralized resource management. It will significantly enhance the working efficiency of system operators and decision-makers. As a result, developing such systems with the aforementioned characteristics for achieving full industrial automation has a positive practical significance in both economy and technology perspectives.

1.1 DEVELOPMENTAL TRENDS

Considering the state of the art in industrial measurement and control fields nowadays, we can see that modern industrial automation systems have the following two evident developmental trends:

One direction is to carry out industrial measurement and control using miniaturized, portable, and universalized instruments. This type of small handheld instrument allows workers on the floor to collect signals from the plant floor and to perform certain simple computation using the general-purpose software burned in the system itself. Then, through the general instrument buses, like IEEE-488 and RS-232, the instrument is connected to a personal computer for further data processing by fully utilizing the more powerful computing capability. This type of instrument is being developed very rapidly.

Another direction is to develop continuous, online, real-time measurement and control systems. The functions of such systems are more comprehensive as compared with the handheld-instrument-based measurement, but the cost is much higher. And such systems are generally more suited for monitoring the key plant equipment. The existing products primarily include the following several components:

- Devices have the powerful capability for data acquisition and signal preprocessing using electrical circuits such as operational amplifiers and filters. This part of electric circuits must ensure that the gathered data can truly reflect the running status of various complex and ever-varying plant operating conditions.

- Dedicated signal analyzers are employed to perform the real-time signal processing for the data collected from factory floor. For instance, the widespread application of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique enables easy and fast analysis of signal characteristics. Furthermore, more and more novel algorithms are being invented for more effective signal processing.

- The advantages provided by Internet or Intranet can be fully exploited by building the networked industrial automation systems. The master computer, which is the system heart, is primarily responsible for collecting data transmitted through the network. The master computer also conducts data manipulation and analysis tasks using its installed software in order to facilitate the appropriate decision-making. In the 1980s, many companies and colleges began developing the measurement and control software. But the majority of the developed software was based on the DOS platform or the earlier 16-bit Windows platforms, and their functions are far from satisfying user's ever-changing requests.

In this book, only the latter measurement and control systems are addressed. In an information-rich world, the tighter integration of various disciplines is the trend for modern industrial automation systems. The trend is the convergence of communication, computing, and control technologies. For instance, the well-known C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) is one of its typical applications. The future industrial automation system will involve more interactions among system components as well as with the physical environment.

1.2 CLASSIFICATIONS AND EXISTING PRODUCTS

From the technical perspective, the application of industrial automation software can be classified into the following categories:

Industrial measurement and control

Remote measurement, communication, and control

Monitoring and alarming of industrial process parameters

Industrial parameters acquisition, processing, presentation, search, and network sharing

From the perspective of application domains, industrial automation software can be applied to the following fields:

Measurement and control of process parameters in industrial production

Parameter monitoring for public utilities such as city LPG pipeline, power transmission, and water supply

Integrated management system for intelligent buildings such as building equipment monitoring and security management

Power management in telecommunication systems

Environment monitoring and protection

Condition monitoring for large rotating machinery

Products quality testing and analysis

Supervision of food and beverage assembly

Safety-critical aerospace applications

In recent years, some industrial automation software packages have been successfully developed and are being used in various industrial application fields. At the time of writing, the major software packages commercially available in global market include Intouch of Wonderware, Fix of Intellution, Genesis of Iconics, WIZCON of PCSOFT, Cimplicity of GE, and so forth. According to their developers, these software packages can be...