Distributed control system approach for a unified power system

This paper presents an approach for applying a distributed control system (DCS) for a unified power system. It is well known that the distributed control system usually serves to control large-scale systems, such as unified power systems, production lines in factories, airplanes, and airport earth services. The proposed distributed control system consists of hardware, software and a number of controllers connected through a communication protocol to develop high speed reliable data communications through the various processing elements. This goal can be evaluated by prediction of loading conditions before designing the distributed control system features. The hardware consists of digital input, digital output, analog input, and analog output devices. The software consists of process control, PC, and database systems. The proposed system is examined through a sample controller connected to the Aswan hydraulic power plant to indicate its effect on the studied system response through its fastness and robustness performance. The results indicate the robustness, and very fast response of the proposed distributed control system over the conventional one.

1 Introduction and Motivation

The distributed control system DCS is used world wide to control the processes in different fields around us. It is used to control both hydraulic and thermal power plants, factories, airplanes and radar systems etc. This control system consists of a number of controllers connected together via a fiber optic network. These controllers have the ability to talk with each other by a certain communication protocols to define what's request from each one to do. This communication process is used to transmit data from one controller to other controllers to decide the required action. The software is used here to design the control algorithm requested to run the hardware part. This software consists of a PC (process control), program and data base program. The PC program is used to run the data base program to give the required functions. Man intervention to such kind of networks is usually done by special operator station which is designed to do this function, and the data can be displayed on a visual basic graphic included in the main program to define the system performance. The Hardware consists of a sub rack, which is connected to the controller data bus these sub racks have a certain addresses used to receive the communication orders from the software. The description of the hardware devices can include the following: