Tire and rubber manufacturing control systems: a comparison of architectures

As higher degrees of product quality demand greater control system performance, the problems encountered when integrating complete control systems become severe. Combining the capabilities of sequential control, analog and discrete processing, motion control, man machine interface, networking, and communications is central to the effective design of a modern control system. One of two architectural approaches, distributed or centralized, is used to solve these integration problems. The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast these two approaches in terms of flexibility, performance, maintainability, and ease of implementation. Applications specific to the tire and rubber industry are used to illustrate the relative advantages and disadvantages of these two architectures