A practical redundancy in the distributed control of power plants

With. a traditional distributed control system (DCS) reliability is maximized through redundancy in the controller, networks, HMI, I/O and power. A DCS used in power plants usually concentrates too much logic in the controllers and one processor may need to solve dozens or even hundreds of loops. Without redundancy, a single failure can bring down the entire control system. In this paper, the authors discuss a path for achieving high reliability with fewer components and less complexity, cost and redundancy.