Industrial Engineer · phase 7 of 16
DCS
Distributed Control System that coordinates process control across networked controllers, operator stations, and engineering servers.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- A distributed control system spreads control across many networked controllers and treats the whole plant as one engineered system, with operator stations, engineering servers and the controllers all from one vendor working as a set.
- Example
- A refinery runs on a DCS. Thousands of loops are configured in one database, every operator screen looks the same, and a change to a loop is made once and appears everywhere.
- Why it matters
- A DCS is built for continuous processes with many analog loops where consistency and availability matter more than cost per point. PLCs are built for discrete machines, and although the two are converging, the mindset behind each is still different.
- Hook
- A plant that thinks of itself as one machine.
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 7: PLC Related Automation Systems
The neighbours a PLC lives beside on a plant floor, from operator panels and SCADA up to the motion and batch systems it hands work to.
