To keep up with evolving technology manufacturers need to upgrade their legacy Distributed Control Systems (DCS). This might be a challenging task to undertake and at a cost to the company, but in the long run the benefits outweigh the costs of doing the upgrade.
The legacy DCS systems faces increased components failure that leads to downtime hence lost production. Maintaining this old equipment might also be expensive in addition to them posing a safety risk.
The modern DCS systems come with more and better features and functionalities that make the system accessibility easier enabling the plant personnel to capture data without difficulties. This helps improve tremendously the operational efficiency and performance of the plant.
The modern DCS systems ensures an open communication to smart field instruments and various manufacturing management systems making the real-time data accessible across the whole factory set up.
Diagnostic and calibration information about various instruments is easily accessible on modern DCS workstation hence no need of employing HART communication devices or other third party asset management systems. With this feature you can save on your maintenance costs.
With the modern DCS systems, plant operators can access most critical information on Human Machine Interface (HMI) units with ease hence able to identify, and respond to a problem without having to go through several menus that are common with legacy DCS.
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Most modern DCS systems can be run on virtual servers hence they are reliable and can be easily moved to a new host in case of a hardware breakdown or a disaster.
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