Process Control Systems Engineering
The subject matter of process control systems engineering are methods and processes for planning, designing and evaluating automated human-machine-systems. The aim of those activities is to design automation systems that allow to operate the technical processes in a safe and economic way. The main task of the humans (field operators, control room personnel) within those systems is to maintain and supervise the automated system. This includes keeping some level of situation awareness (What's going on? How will the process evolve?), adapting the system to changing market demands or disturbances and reconfiguring the sytem when technical failures of process and automation equipment occur.
Areas of Interest and Interfaces in Process Control System Engineering
Research Areas
Current challenges for the engineering of those systems are ever raising demands on productivity and safety with decreasing time-to-market and engineering round-trip times. On the technological side of these MMIs we see a still unbroken trend to decentralize computational power and implement complex information processing functions whereever needed.
To meet these challenges, process control systems engineering urgently needs to optimize the information exchange between humans and machines. Towards that goal we focus on two specific topics. First, we investigate and develop methods and support systems for even more integrated engineering processes by means of information modelling, model driven architectures, work flows and engineering processes. Second, we develop and investigate novel patterns for enterprise and mobile information systems that perfectly fit the specific demands of the process industries.
Human and machine in a chemical plant
Img BASFHead of Group
Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Leon Urbas
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