ESPRIT IV Project 21017 INNOVA
High Performance Telemeasurement and Telecontrol Station with Image and Sound Capabilities
Table of Contents
1. Project Summary
2. Consortium and contacts
INNOVA Project aims at developing the software to be embedded in a new generation of high performance computing telecontrol stations, that will be integrated in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for the industry. These stations will deal not only with the conventional digital and analog signals provided by the process sensors usually employed in the industry, but also with image and sound signals. With their ability to obtain process information through a real-time fusion of conventional control signals, images and sounds, the INNOVA stations will allow the development of more complete, flexible, reliable and secure control systems to solve outstanding industrial control problems.
Apart from the acquisition, processing, analysis and fusion of all those types of input signals, the INNOVA software will also handle digital and analog output signals so that appropriate control actions can be applied over the process. These actions will be decided upon the process state information either manually by a human operator, or automatically by programmed control algorithms.
Other functionalities provided by the INNOVA software will be:
· continuous logging of process state and detected events in a real-time database
· support of a man-machine interface facility for the presentation of process state information, including acquired images and sounds
· communications through narrowband channels with a central control computer for the exchange of process state information, including digital image and sound data.
To perform all these functions and yet satisfy the requirement of real-time operation, which is mandatory for most industrial process control applications, the INNOVA software will have to be run on a high performance computer. Additionally, a reasonable cost of the resulting telecontrol station is also of most importance for the potential users. Therefore, the INNOVA station must be highly configurable, so that it can be easily adapted to every specific control application at the optimum cost. This requirement can be satisfied only with a modular, scaleable and open architecture. For this reason, the envisaged hardware platform for the INNOVA station is a Multiple Instruction Multiple Data (MIMD) shared-memory machine based on a multiprocessor system bus (VME), and configured from commercially available boards that will support the interfaces to the process and will provide the required computing power. This hardware platform will be completed with a standard real-time operating system (RTOS) providing off-the-shelf support of multiprocessor systems. This RTOS must support also the development of highly portable application software, mainly through its availability for a wide number of microprocessor architectures (INTEL, MOTOROLA, DEC, MIPS, etc.), but also through the compliance of the interfaces to its services with standards (POSIX).
The INNOVA Consortium, composed by three development partners (EID, ELIOP and UNINOVA) and an end-user (EOSA) will accomplish the tasks of developing and demonstrating such telemeasurement and telecontrol station. The steel manufacturing process run by EOSA will serve to demonstrate the operation of the INNOVA station in a real-world pilot application. This industrial process has been selected as test-bed due to the existence of specific control problems in it that are not well-solved by conventional systems, and also because of the extreme operating conditions that are present in steelworks. The objective is to address those outstanding control problems making use of the image and sound capabilities of the INNOVA station, thus allowing the end-user to obtain qualitative and quantitative improvements in the operation of the existing steel manufacturing facilities. The achievement of this objective will undoubtedly contribute to demonstrate to other potential users the real advantage of the INNOVA station with respect to more conventional real-time embedded systems for industrial control applications.
ELIOP, S.A.
Avda. de Manoteras, s/n
E-28050 Madrid
SPAIN
Tel: (+34-1) 302 39 40 FAX: (+34-1) 302 92 49 e-mail: innova@eliop.es
Jesús Tardón (E-mail: tardon@eliop.es) (Overall Prj Mng)
José Miguel Huesa (E-mail: huesa@eliop.es) (Prj Mng)
EID, S.A.
Quinta dos Medronheiros, Lazarim
P.O. Box 27
P-2825 Monte de Caparica
PORTUGAL
Tel: (+351-1) 294 86 00 FAX: (+351-1) 294 87 00 e-mail: innova@eid.pt
Domingos Nunes (E-mail: nunes@eid.pt) (Prj Mng)
UNINOVA - Instituto de Novas Tecnologias
Centro de Robótica Inteligente
(CRI)
Quinta da Torre, Campus da
FCT/UNL
P-2825 Monte da Caparica
PORTUGAL
Tel: (351-1) 35 00 200 FAX: (351-1) 294 12 53 e-mail: innova@uninova.pt
Luís Gomes (E-mail: lugo@uninova.pt) (Prj Mng) (Tel.: (351-1) 35 00 233)
Anikó Costa (E-mail: akc@uninova.pt)
Carlos Soares (E-mail: cs@uninova.pt)
Dirk Tilsner (E-mail: dt@uninova.pt)
ESTEBAN ORBEGOZO, S.A.
Barrio Artiz, 20
E-20700 Zumárraga
SPAIN
Tel: (+34-43) 72 00 11 FAX: (+34-43) 72 60 25
Angel Armentia (Prj Mng)
accesses since 1997/01/01