An innovative industrial control system architecture for real‐time response, fault‐tolerant operation and seamless plant integration

Large‐scale infrastructure and industrial projects face schedule delays, cost overruns and performance shortfalls. One cause is the late delivery of their control systems that end up being complex and unsuited. To overcome this problem, an innovative industrial control system is proposed that can be commissioned almost effortlessly and delivered on time without functional defects in most large‐scale industrial and infrastructure construction projects, while offering high capacity (>25,000 filed devices scanning >100,000 signals) and straightforward scalability, upgradability and maintainability. Designed with a central controller and distributed sensing and actuating devices, and equipped with a cluster of servers and an Ethernet network transporting video, voice and data (>300 video and >750 voice streams), it integrates plant automation technologies with data communication techniques, allowing industrial and information technology applications to coexist and cooperate. While being tolerant to faults and fast in its response, it provides high safety integrity level (>SIL 2) and real‐time automatic reaction in repetitive stimuli or occasional events (programmable from 5 to 250 ms). In this paper, with the provided system blueprint and engineering guidelines, this novel system architecture can be built with off‐the‐shelf components seamlessly integrated in the context of Cyber Physical Systems.