A unified system-framework engine for industrial instrumentation systems

Abstract

To create high-quality products and improve the productivity of iron- and steel-making processes, several types of instrumentation system are used in the process-operation lines. However, current instrumentation systems have fundamental problems with supporting flexibility, extendibility and reconfigurability (FER) in their operation and management. This is because of their dependence on vendor-specific technologies or operational environmental constraints. To address these problems, this paper proposes a unified instrumentation-system-framework engine (U-ISFE) capable of dynamically configuring, building, realising and adjusting operational features of target instrumentation systems in iron- and steel-making processes. The U-ISFE is designed on the basis of a systems engineering approach, a powerful methodology for developing complex systems in multidisciplinary domains. To demonstrate the applicability and validity of the U-ISFE, a real instrumentation system in a blast furnace process, one of the most important iron- and steel-making processes, has been developed using the U-ISFE. The U-ISFE can effectively offer the FER features to all operational parts of instrumentation systems in a unified manner; thus, it can be readily applied to other manufacturing areas.