A common sense of time among all the elements of a distributed measurement and control system allows the use of new techniques for the solution of problems with complex synchronization requirements or arising from the interaction of many sensors and actuators. Such a common sense of time may be accomplished using IEEE Standard for a Precision Clock Synchronization Protocol for Networked Measurement and Control Systems (IEEE 1588-2002) to synchronize real-time clocks incorporated within each component of the system.

IEEE 1588, published in November 2002, is a technology new...

Safety in industrial process and production plants is a concern of rising importance, especially if people would be endangered by a catastrophic system failure. On the other hand, because the control devices which are now exploited to improve the overall performance of industrial processes include both sophisticated digital system design techniques and complex hardware (input-output sensors, actuators, components and processing units), there is an increased probability of failure. As a direct consequence of this, control systems must include automatic supervision of closed-loop operation...

Modern industrial processes and systems require adaptable advanced control protocols able to deal with circumstances demanding "judgement" rather than simple "yes/no," "on/off" responses: circumstances where a linguistic description is often more relevant than a cut-and-dried numerical one. The ability of fuzzy systems to handle numeric and linguistic information within a single framework renders them efficacious for this purpose.

Fuzzy Logic, Identification and Predictive Control first shows you how to construct static and dynamic fuzzy models using the numerical data...

Many process control books focus on control design techniques, taking the construction of a process model for granted. Process Modelling for Control concentrates on the modelling steps underlying a successful design, answering questions like:

How should I carry out the identification of my process in order to obtain a good model?

How can I assess the quality of a model with a view to using it in control design?

How can I ensure that a controller will stabilise a real process sufficiently well before implementation?

What is the most efficient method of...

Foresight can be crucial in process and production control, production-and-resources planning and in management decision making generally. Although forecasting the future from accumulated historical data has become a standard and reliable method in production and financial engineering, as well as in business and management, the use of time series analysis in the on-line milieu of most industrial plants has been more problematic because of the time and computational effort required.

The advent of intelligent computational technologies such as the neural network and the genetic...