Benefits Calculation for DCS installation

S

Thread Starter

siim

One of our customers has asked us to estimate the benefits that could be achieved by migrating from traditional controllers to a DCS system.

Has any of you had to do this before? Is there a methodology to do this? Could anybody point me in the good direction?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
siim
 
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Fred Gjoertz

Dear siim,

I guess a lot of the potential benefits depend on the application and the industry in which the transformation is taking place.

One of our biggest clients, Rolls-Royce Marine, decided to base all of their control systems on our platform, CDP - Control Design Platform, which is a truly distributed architecture. CDP comprises of a development environment and a middleware, which facilitates the development, installation, commissioning and live operations of distributed systems.

Apart from the evident benefit of faster development times, quicker commissioning time and reduced costs, Rolls-Royce Marine saw the following additional benefits of their distributed system:

- seamless communication between controllers
- coordination of several controllers' activity made possible, either from central locations or directly between controllers
- all signals, parameters, alarms, messages etc. from all controllers available everywhere on the network
- centralized alarm- and event-management easily accomplished
- centralized overview of total operation of system easily presented on centralized GUI
- centralized logging of all activity on all controllers (CDP allows logging to SQL DB or to file)
- added redundancy to mission critical controllers (due to built-in library functions in CDP middleware allowing redundancy to be added using disparate HW and OS!)
- remote maintenance of all systems possible through CDP's built-in web-browser
- reduction of service crew as all systems presenting same maintenance interface

Although we have no methodology for such a transfer in place, one possibility I can see is to replace the controllers with Industrial PCs and wrap the existing PLC-code (CoDeSys IEC 61131-3) in CDP-code, network the iPCs and access all the features of CDP on your network. It sounds easy and sometimes is, but again it depends on your particular application.

If you want to know more about this, please visit our web-site: www.icd.no or contact me directly.

Good luck.


Best regards,
Fred Gjoertz
International Business Development Manager
Industrial Control Design AS
Phone: +41 22 776 85 82
Mobile: +41 79 500 99 22
1, Chemin le Grenier
CH-1291 Commugny
Switzerland
[email protected]
www.icd.no

 
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