Introduction to the status quo and development trend of automated instrumentation and control systems

Status and development trend of automated instrumentation and control systems


First, the basic status of automated instrumentation and control systems

Entering the 21st century, the rapid development of China's manufacturing industry has driven the demand for automated instrumentation and control systems. The advanced level of automated instrumentation and control systems used in China's new large-scale projects has been at the world's leading level. At present, the traditional manufacturing industry has passed a glorious period in developed countries, and the automation instruments associated with it naturally grow slowly. Hotspots in the development of automated instruments The price issue in emerging markets is a challenge to instrument manufacturers in two ways. First, users in emerging markets are highly sensitive to product prices; second, they can often find very cheap alternatives, which makes it difficult Inspire multinational companies to spend large sums of money to develop new instruments.

In the past 10 years, the development of fieldbus technology, an important field of automation instrument technology, has achieved remarkable achievements, but it is still in the stage of replacing analog transmission lines. In fact, the field bus is not only a change of the signal system, it is the basis for the information technology of control technology. The user's need for the underlying informationization (control, diagnosis, management) of the system is the original driving force for the promotion of fieldbus technology. In recent years, the potential of fieldbus in equipment asset management, predictive diagnosis and smooth operation has begun to be tapped, showing a very promising momentum.

However, based on fieldbus technology, networked control and distributed intelligent technology, no significant breakthrough has been made in theory or in practice: the speed bottleneck of fieldbus is sometimes inferior in terms of complex control and fast response. Traditional instrumentation: The battle for fieldbus that has been going on for many years has not been a winner among manufacturers, and it has made users feel bored and greatly consumed the resources of various enterprises.

Several important windows reflecting the trend of automation instrument products in the world: the international instrument exhibition represented by ISA EXPO, Miconix, etc., represented by the Readers’ Choice Award. From the reader selection awards of the past three years, the award-winning products have not changed much. The focus of automation instrument development this year is on the application of instruments.

This change in development trend is very natural. After 10 years of development, digital and intelligent instruments and systems have accumulated some problems in application, and many innovative functions of smart meter design have not been fully applied. The main issues are as follows.

(1) Information privacy and security issues in digital meters and systems
(2) The issue of the feasibility of microprograms and software.
(3) Confidentiality, security and identities of communication.
(4) The smart meter can interact with the control system and interact with it when it is running.
(5) Smart meters provide far more information than analog meters and how to make the most of this information.
(6) Interoperability problems of many smart meters.
(7) Fault diagnosis of instruments and systems and interoperability problems of fault diagnosis information.

The above problems are all caused by digitization and networking. It is not that the prior art cannot solve these problems, but there are too many alternative solutions, and a unified solution is the most effective. And how to unify is currently under study.

Although the speed of the introduction of new products for automation instruments has slowed down, the history of the development of automated instrumentation technology continues, and the enthusiasm of instrument manufacturers for new technology development in the past two years is not high, but the enthusiasm of instrument users to develop automation technology is getting higher and higher. Recently, there has been remarkable development in the integration of information technology, instrument security technology, and wireless communication technology. In addition, the deceleration of the introduction of new foreign products has brought opportunities for the development of China's instruments. Domestic instruments have continued to develop healthily in the past two years. The overall trend of the industry and the introduction of the 2006-2007 Instrument Science and Technology Discipline Development Report have not changed significantly. Therefore, this report can also be considered as a supplement.

The six major concerns of ISA EXPO 2008 are: information security, process automation, environmental and quality control, wireless and network communications, and enterprise integration. In fact, the major instrument exhibitions in the world, including the Miconix exhibition in China, have been the subject of the past two years. It can be said that these six aspects reflect the main developments in the field of automated instrumentation in the past two years. Information security, process automation, and environmental control are primarily driven by technologies outside the field of automated instrumentation in six areas, and the rest of this report does not focus on it.

China Investment Advisory Network's "2009-2012 China Instrumentation Industry Investment Analysis and Forecast Report", in the introduction of the domestic instrumentation also appropriately expressed the lack of development of the domestic automation instrument field, the discussion is this: "Although China's instrument and meter industry has developed to a certain extent, it is far from meeting the growing needs of the national economy, scientific research, national defense construction, and social life. Most of China's instrumentation products are middle and low-end technology. And the key indicators such as characterization and stability have not yet met the requirements. Therefore, China needs to make long-term planning, and revitalize the measurement control and instrumentation industry as a systematic project, from the main aspects affecting the measurement control and instrumentation industry. Including government, business, social environment, research and educational institutions to develop coordinated strategic measures and implement them in earnest."

Second, the development trend of automated instrumentation and control systems

(1) Automation instrumentation and enterprise informationization

The development of information technology brings two aspects to the automation instrument: on the one hand, information technology and automation instruments compete for talents. In the climax of IT development, many experienced instrument workers turn to the IT industry, which is the reason for the slowdown of instrument product launch in recent years. On the other hand, automated instruments borrowed some mature technologies and products from the TI industry to speed up the pace of information.

Informatization is the trend of the current era. Automated instrumentation technology includes processes such as information collection, information processing, and information application. Therefore, automated instrumentation technology is actually an important branch of information technology. The so-called "enterprise integration" is actually the information integration and integration of enterprises. The so-called "information explosion" actually obtains information beyond the ability of processing and application, and a major obstacle to the application is that the uniformity of information expression is not enough. How to improve the ability to process and apply information is the current topic.

Informatization requires real-world physical things (including raw materials, equipment, products, control systems, instruments, etc.), production processes (including manufacturing methods, processes, etc.). The management of the enterprise (including procurement, sales, logistics, etc.) can be identified and processed by the computer with 0 and 1, and then calculated and processed by the computer, and finally the result of the processing is reversed to the real world.

The premise of informatization is to transform the relationship between the real world and the real world things into 0 and 1. It is impossible to realize this step of informationization. To do this is to build an information model for the real world.

The information model is a set of simplified information. An abstract description of things made according to certain rules.

The definition of information model includes three elements: simplification, rules and abstraction. The diversity of these three factors determines the diversification of possible information models. The process of building information models includes the task of overcoming diversity and achieving unity. The goal of automated instrumentation and system information models is to describe information in an unambiguous manner to facilitate exchanges for basic positioning and ultimately to achieve broad interoperability.

In September 2006, at the automation forum of the IEC100 anniversary event in Berlin, Germany, IFAC expert Professor Diedrich gave a report entitled "Information Model for Automated Plants", introducing different levels of control, different types of information at different stages of production. , different information processing technologies and tools.

The work of establishing an information model is a basic work in the field of automated instrumentation, and it can only be used as a means of drug delivery. The main contents include: 1. Establishing rules for describing things; 2. Describe the large amount of food designed according to the rules. Create a model library.

Establishing rules for describing things is a complicated research work, because with different cultural backgrounds, different religious beliefs, different descriptions of things, and different levels of detail, there are many ways to describe them. What we need is at present. Solutions that are adaptable to information processing and widely accepted by the public, often end up in the form of international standards. Significant progress has been made in the development of such international standards in the last two years.

The rules for describing things can be simplified into three categories according to their properties:

(1) An information model that describes things. For example, an information model describing the production of raw materials, components, control system equipment, equipment, state of production process, intermediate and final product content, this type of model should describe the basic properties of the object, typically represented by the IEC361987 industrial process. The data structure and element series standards in the catalogue of measurement and control process equipment and the standard data element type series standards related to the IEC61360 and electronic component classification schemes.

(2) A model that describes the relationship between things (especially quantitative relationships). The important role of informatization is to optimize things. The condition of optimization is to understand the (quantitative) relationship between things. Such models often appear in the form of mathematical models. Such models are often highly targeted and difficult to establish a unified and widely applied model, so they are less likely to appear in the form of international standards.

(3) Describe the object process information model. For example, the production process and management process, the typical representative is the IEC62264 enterprise system integration series standard.

In the establishment of information models for automated instrumentation and applications, universities and research institutions in China have long studied. However, it has not been an important basis for the informatization of this work to promote industrialization. There has been a lack of national or industry level, comprehensive system planning and large-scale work.

China's TC159 National Industrial Automation System and Integration Standardization Technical Committee and TC124 National Industrial Process Measurement and Control Standardization Technical Committee have done a lot of work in tracking and adopting international standards. In addition to sending experts to join international standards, the working group directly participates in the designation of international standards. In addition, important information model standards are translated into national standards in a timely manner. With these methodological standards for establishing information models, the studios that need to be done later: propaganda, implementation, and learning, use these methods to establish an accredited repository of interoperable information, and apply these repositories to serve enterprise automation. .

Since the information model is still a new thing for domestic enterprises and engineers, the above-mentioned work is still quite complicated at the beginning. The most important thing is that China's manufacturing enterprises are less proactive in proposing informationization needs. Therefore, China is relatively backward in this respect and urgently needs attention. .

(II) Integration of global information and life cycle information of automated instrumentation engineering projects

The integrated integration of the global and full lifecycle is actually the full interoperability of automated instrumentation systems. Interoperability is hierarchical, the most basic is the interoperability of the process control machine, that is, the control system and the field instrument surface layer are exempt from interoperability, and the upper layer is the interoperable operation of the control system maintenance and production equipment diagnostic information. On the upper level is the customer operation of enterprise management information. Global information integration should at least achieve interoperability of global information.

Different levels of interoperable technologies and methods are not exactly the same. Main technical history in control systems and field instrumentation layers: Kungfu block, EDDL (Electronic Device Description Language), FDT/DTM (Field Device Tool/Device Type Manager), OPC UA (formerly Ole for Process Control, Process Control Control Object) Linking and embedding: Openness, Productivity & Collaboration, openness, productivity and collaboration; corporate management is partly based on MES (Manufacturing Execution System) technology. Global information integration requires at least the exchange of information between the various layers of the enterprise.

The automation system engineer project from the demonstration to the completion of the production and operation, the overhaul maintenance, the production process will produce a lot of technical documents at each stage, the documents at each stage are strongly related, and these documents are now in binary form. in. After applying the unified information model in each stage, the documents in the next stage can have good inheritance from the previous stage. For example, the control logic configuration diagram will be compiled during the engineering design phase of the project. If a unified information model is used, the system can be configured directly from the diagram during the commissioning phase. The integration of lifecycle information is to achieve interoperability between the various stages of the system.

Such an information integration solution is provided by the user of the meter. Because the user of the instrument is close to the production process and close to the application, some user organizations have put forward many requirements for the application of the automation instrument, and some group standards have been formulated. Now they gradually convert these group standards into national, European or international standards, such as the representation of IEC61242 process control engineering - the requirements for data exchange between P&I diagrams and P&ID tools and PCE-CAE tools and several of IEC61987 Part (P&I, pipeline engineering and instrumentation; P&ID, pipeline engineering and instrumentation system diagram; PCE, process control engineering; CAE, computer-aided engineering).

The long-term process of information integration of the whole process and the whole life cycle of the automation instrument engineering project has been an important sign in the development of the IEC62424 standard in the past two years.

China has always been research institutions in tracking the development direction of information integration technology in the whole and the whole life cycle. When the relevant standard documents are submitted to the International Organization for Standardization by the technical group, TC124 will soon arrange experts to join the drafting working group. This tracking has been going on for many years. It is. At the same time, TC124 also timely translated the published international standards into national standards.

The concept of information integration in the whole life cycle is relatively new to engineers in China. Although some engineering projects use InTools, a tool software that can integrate information integration throughout the life cycle, people only put it in a certain life stage.

China's information integration of automated instrumentation in the process of system operation is not enough. The fieldbus intelligent instrument is used in time, and the data communication industry only serves as a substitute for transmission. The reason for this situation is that on the one hand, the demand for enterprise informationization by Chinese users is not urgent; on the other hand, we lack effective information integration software that meets the actual conditions of various industries in China. Automated instrumentation workers do not know enough about what informationization can do, and what benefits users have for informationization is not clear, and there is no requirement for how to do it. These factors have affected the development of information integration technology.

Some people think that the development of smart meters represented by digitalization and networking has three stages: the first stage is to replace the analog instruments with digital fieldbus intelligent meters, the key is to save the installation cost and improve the performance of the instrument; the second stage is engineering and instrumentation. The integration of global information and life-cycle information, to achieve informationization, the focus is to improve the management level and operational efficiency of the project; the third phase is the wireless communication instrument as an important feature to achieve the so-called "ubiquitous measurement, ubiquitous network "Ubiquitous computing" to achieve true network control, the focus is to comprehensively improve the efficiency of enterprises. The three-stage goal is quite far