Design And Development Of Configuration Environment Of Virtual DCS

Distributed Control System is a multi-computer control system, which is a collection of computer, communication and screen display technology, realizing the data acquisition, control and sharing of production processes. Its characteristics of function distribution and management concentration make it widely used in industrial control field. In the modern automation system, such as control strategy implementation, data acquisition and processing, optimization calculation and other DCS functions are almost completely achieved by the implementation of its respective functional software. As a powerful software platform tool of DCS system, DCS engineer station configuration software can be used to build different control strategy and perform different control functions simply by changing the combination structure or the entity data of the application object for specific engineering applications, which greatly improves the maturity and reliability of DCS system. Today the configuration software in the field of industrial automation is developed by expert DCS companies, which can only be used for the specific DCS products. There are considerable differences in the configuration software of different systems, whether the architecture or the function implementation, which could not meet the demands of universal, openness and comprehensiveness of the current control system. The general DCS configuration software in this paper is a kind of computer platform with high sense of reality, which takes a certain set of virtual DCS system as the underlying operating environment, and it can simulate several sets of different DCS configuration environment through the upper algorithm definition and module assemblage. This platform can not only be used for the corresponding DCS configuration training for thermal workers in different power station, greatly reducing the cost of the purchase of DCS software and hardware simulation equipment, and improving the economic efficiency, but also meet the requirements of design verification and optimization for different DCS applications, which has good development prospects and positive practical significance.In this paper, after a detailed analysis of Emerson's Ovation virtual DCS system and Xinhua XDPS system, a more general storage scheme of configuring relationship has been summarized. And then grasping the architecture, configuration steps and interface characteristics of configuration software V6.0 in XDPS engineering station, an integrated configuration software for the upper computer platform, is designed and developed by using V6.0 interface as the template and C++Builder as the development tool. The concrete implementation process mainly contains graphics generating software, algorithm entering software, configuration platform and OPC communications technology. The graphics generating and algorithm entering software are primarily used to customize function modules of any DCS systems according to the wishes of industrial users, thus ensuring that the software can simulate different DCS products. The main configuration platform is a human-machine interface to define and configurate the control logic. In order to ensure that the simulated configuration logic file can be downloaded to run, and support the function of in-circuit debugging and data monitoring, OPC communication program, based on the OPC server in the underlying Ovation operational system, is designed to achieve the real-time data exchange between the upper configuration software and Ovation system DPU, in which a shared memory area has been created by the method of memory-mapped files.