Adopting EWMA Filter on a Fast Sampling Wired Link Contention in WirelessHART Control System

The performance of a wireless industrial process plant is affected by wired and wireless link's reliability. While recent related works focus mainly on wireless link's reliability, this paper focuses on wired link's reliability between the controller and the wireless highway addressable remote transducer (WirelessHART) node. In control application for a process plant with fast sampling, when the wired link delay is too short, message transmissions to the node could occur concurrently resulting in packet collision and packet dropout, thus leading to local contention. This can cause process plant with critical control application to be unstable. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective design of exponentially weighted moving average filter to mitigate the contention's effect and improve the process plant's performance. In order to make evident and validate the existence of local contention, an experiment is carried out using a WirelessHART device. From the experiment, the controller delay is 0.1475 s and the estimated packet dropout is 12.29%. Simulation results with the designed filter show a significant improvement in process performance in terms of percentage of overshoot compared with performance of the process plant using traditionally optimized PID controller.