SIMULATION ON DISTRIBUTED CONTROL SYSTEM TIME DELAY

One of the fastest growing market segments among control and automation technologies is the introduction and development of network control systems. Even though, fieldbus systems have been used for several years, functional and performance validation is an important issue addressed by fieldbus network design. Simulation support is needed for early functional validation and performance as an evaluation tool for the network design and operation performance analysis in early engineering stages. The delay time which is a random variable produced in the essence of the networked control system transmission process can greatly reduce the performance of control systems such as rising time and overshoot increasing, and situation where the control system become unstable. Therefore, this project briefly explains about the study on the fieldbus real time performance in term of time delay. Delay analysis on a designed cascaded control tank system with the case study of with and without controller have been performed to observe the severity of time delay on fieldbus system. The scope of study covered includes study on methodology to perform analysis on the fieldbus system of a plant using SIMULINK. From the findings, it can be observed that induced delay in complex fieldbus system is very prominent. Complex plant system has a high network delay and response time. Thus, these drawbacks can be overcome using simulation environment to forecast system behaviour and find the best suited network solutions beforehand to minimize engineering and hardware costs.