Components and Instruments for Distributed Control Systems

Book excerpt: Components and Instruments for Distributed Control Systems provides a conceptual framework for organizing the elements of the distributed system for integration of the many diverse information processing, decision-making, and control functions that are involved in a total plant control. With the enormous progress in micro-electronics that has taken place over the past years, intelligent instruments can now be created that integrate processing once reserved for calculators. This book notes that the development of distributed micro-computing systems is linked to this progress, and their use in industry and in service areas is becoming more and more widespread. This text also emphasizes that great progress has also been made in the design of sensors and other components in the automatic control chain. This book is a useful reference for students and individuals studying instrument development and its use in distributed control.