Supervisory and Control System for Thermal Treating Processes

Nowadays, there are a lot of achievements in the field of thermal treating processes, in industrial automation on the market. The paper focuses on giving an alternative approach for the furnace control, in order to contribute to global performance improvement of the heat treatments (providing high quality products, reducing the energy consumption, and the wastes). The paper describes our effort focused on improving implementation techniques for the development of a surveillance system for thermal treating processes, in order to enhance the performance of the entire system. Two approaches (both under development), are discussed: one version of the surveillance system, which supports interpreted languages (Tcl/Tk, Python, Ruby, BLT, TkZinc), and the other one which is based on compiled languages (OOP, Lazarus). These two alternatives are compared from the perspective of a certain operating system: Windows, or Unix. The authors evaluated also the capabilities of using external packages (for networking, graphics, data storing). Finally several guidelines for developing the surveillance system for the class of thermal treatment processes are proposed, and the networking components of the surveillance system are considered from the perspective of a distributed plant (both LAN Ethernet, and wireless solutions)