Optimizing Distributed Foundation Fieldbus Process Control with MSP.RTL Tool

In a foundation fieldbus-based process control system, control strategies are implemented in a distributed environment on devices connected to the fieldbus. Although the fieldbus standard specifies the procedure to implement a given control strategy, it is left to system engineers to figure out the optimal configuration of a strategy. In this paper, we present a practical software tool that searches for the optimal deployment of a control strategy, in terms of overall finish time of the macrocycle and the number of published message on the bus. Despite the theoretically high worst-case time complexity, our tool´s running time is acceptable in practice because of the limited size of a fieldbus network in practice. In addition, we propose an effective heuristic to reduce the running time further. Experiments with real world data show that our program outperforms a commercial control system in terms of the quality of schedules generated.