Unified Power-Process Controller for Low-Latency Interoperability
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Solution Overview
Problem
The integration of power and process control systems faces challenges such as interfacing disparate technologies, ensuring cybersecurity, managing interoperability complexities, and excessive control latency due to conventional techniques requiring direct parallel hardwiring and interlocks or the use of gateways and intersystem cabling.
Innovation Solution
A unified controller that combines process and electrical control namespaces within a common database, supporting multiple logical engines, and enabling seamless integration by hosting multiple communication protocols, reducing the need for separate communication modules and gateways, and ensuring high availability through redundancy architectures.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If conventional techniques for combining process and electrical control schemes are used (direct parallel hardwiring and interlocks or gateways with intersystem cabling), then interoperability between disparate control systems is achieved, but device complexity and control latency increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges process control and electrical control namespaces into a single unified namespace within one controller. This consolidation eliminates the need for separate controllers, gateways, and intersystem cabling, thereby reducing device complexity while maintaining interoperability between process and electrical control schemes
Solution Approach 2:
The unified controller is designed to perform multiple functions by hosting both process control and electrical control namespaces simultaneously. This multi-functional approach allows a single device to replace multiple specialized devices, reducing overall system complexity while preserving the ability to interface with disparate control technologies
2Adaptability or versatility
If gateways and intersystem cabling with marshalling cubicles are used for namespace conversion, then communication between different control protocols is enabled, but control latency and round trip time become excessive
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the namespace conversion function from external gateways and marshalling cubicles and integrates it directly into the unified controller. This eliminates intermediate conversion steps and reduces the number of communication hops, thereby significantly reducing control latency and round trip time while maintaining protocol interoperability
Solution Approach 2:
The unified namespace acts as an intermediary layer that directly maps process control addresses to electrical control addresses within the same controller. This internal mediation eliminates the need for external gateways and reduces communication latency by keeping the conversion process local rather than distributed across multiple devices
3Reliability
If separate process and electrical controllers are used with gateway conversion, then cybersecurity boundaries between control domains are maintained, but device complexity and integration difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The unified controller implements logical segmentation by maintaining distinct process control and electrical control namespaces within a single device. This segmentation preserves cybersecurity boundaries between control domains while eliminating the need for physical separation through multiple controllers and gateways, thereby reducing integration complexity
Data Source
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AI summary
A high availability controller for combining and unifying aspects of a process controller and an electrical controller. A unified namespace combines a process domain namespace and a power domain namespace in a common database of the controller without altering either. The unified namespace maps source device names of the power domain and unique process control names of the process domain. A common record set of sequence of events (SOEs) for the process domain and the power domain is generated and SOEs arising from the power domain are incorporated into the common record set. The controller performs process control and monitoring along with electrical control signaling and monitoring within a single control strategy directly from the controller.