Distributed Process Monitoring and Management

This paper outlines the techniques and philosophies developed within the Intelligent Process Monitoring and Management (IPMM) Centre at Cardiff University. The developments outlined use innovations in microcontroller-based technologies to demonstrate the great potential for low-cost, distributed, intelligent condition monitoring systems. The resulting monitoring and management systems are flexible and use existing machine, process and controller signals as an initial source of process information, thereby reducing implementation cost and time. The paper illustrates how, using the advanced digital and analogue signal acquisition and processing functionality of ever more powerful microcontrollers, key analogue sensor signals may be used to support monitoring functions. This approach ultimately intelligently manage the handling of acquired signals to ensure that only fault related data are entered into the high level signal processing functions. Thus the proposed work exhibits synergy with concurrent research in intelligent signal analysis