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Preface
TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 9 - An Object-Oriented Reconfigurable Software for Industrial Measurement and Control
9An Object-Oriented Reconfigurable Software for Industrial Measurement and ControlCondition monitoring is a significant domain in modern industrial measurement and control. Hazardous accidents and machine failures always result in defective products, equipment breakdown, environment pollution, and even human life loss. As a result, machine failures and production accidents are highly undesirable because they reduce plant productivity as well as enterprise profits. In this chapter, a generic Reconfigurable Software for Industrial Measurement and Control (RSFIMC) is discussed. The software consists of three individual modules: data acquisition, data processing, and data browsing. It integrates different software development technologies such as reconfiguration, object orientation, database management, core Windows programming, and data exchange. The reconfigurable condition monitoring software has been successfully installed and operated in a large petrochemical plant, which turns out to be very capable of providing continuous condition monitoring to aid the operation personnel in dealing with various field operational situations. 9.1 INTRODUCTION Condition monitoring for industrial processes is to provide an effective way to prevent incipient failures in the plant equipment. It enables the preventive maintenance possible before the equipment failure really happens [37]. Furthermore, remedial measures can be taken in a timely manner to reduce the possible production losses. So far, many industrial measurement and control systems have been developed for different industrial application. However, these systems are usually very expensive and inflexible. For instance, such condition monitoring systems are mostly designed for the specific industrial application environment. When the hardware of the measurement and control system needs to be altered or upgraded, its software must have to be redesigned and rebuilt accordingly. In recent years, the concept of reconfiguration has attracted much attention from a wide variety of real-world industrial applications [4, 7, 9, 13, 14, 20, 31-34, 39]. Reconfiguration is the key issue to achieve flexible industrial measurement and control systems. Without needing the additional custom coding, which is often necessary for traditional condition monitoring systems, the reconfigurable system is able to handle internal and external system uncertainties in a cost-effective manner. Therefore, developing such a reconfigurable and flexible software for various condition monitoring environments is highly necessary and beneficial to modern industrial applications. This chapter discusses such an object-oriented reconfigurable software for industrial measurement and control. The software is efficiently developed due to the systematic software engineering adopted. Practical applications of the developed reconfigurable software turns out to be highly effective in performing real-time condition monitoring and assisting in fault diagnosis. |
