Design and validation of distributed control with decentralized intelligence in process industries: A survey

This paper presents an overview of the works on design and validation of distributed control in process industry. Due to the significant market demand for distributed reconfigurable systems, not just in manufacturing industry but also in process industry, several researches are undertaken to look at the design techniques in implementation of such a decentralized control approach. It has shown that a distributed control can bring benefits such as flexibility, reconfigurability and software reusability. International standards such as IEC61499 and IEC61804 are established for such distributed application with newly introduced Function Block (FB) concepts. Intelligent control and multi-agents approach are emerging techniques for distributed control application. In particular, a process control system is generally considered as a hybrid system because it usually contains both discrete and continuous dynamics. Therefore when handling validation of distributed systems, hybrid verification and simulation will have an important role.