Aspen Control Platform
Architecture
The Aspen Control Platform is a Microsoft .NET-based software
architecture that consists of five different pieces, as shown in
Figure 1. At the lowest layer are four subsystems that serve as the
glue for any APC application and include Real-Time Environment, the
Control Model Architecture, the Numerical Foundation, and The
Desktop UI Framework.
Figure 1: The Aspen Control
Platform
The Real-Time Environment (RTE) provides the
infrastructure necessary to execute and manage applications in an
online or simulated online environment. It also provides real-time
as well as short-term historical access to plant and application
data.
The Control Model Architecture (CMA) is a
framework addressing the domain of advanced control. It defines the
core properties that all models must possess and provides an
infrastructure for posing and solving math programming problems
online. CMA is the mechanism that brings together the various and
potentially disparate control technologies and model types under a
single unifying framework and allows them to operate together
within an RTE application.
The Numerical Foundation (NF) is a set of
numerical toolboxes that implement a wide range of foundation
algorithms for solving numerical problems. These toolboxes provide
the core numerical foundation required for the statistical, matrix,
and control calculations associated with advanced process
control.
The Desktop UI (User Interface) Framework is an
open framework designed to handle common UI tasks such as Menus,
Commands, Toolbars, Do/Undo, Persistence, State Management, Events,
Localization, Preferences, and Resource Management. The UI
framework also defines an extensible plug-in architecture that
allows new features to be developed and dropped into any desktop
application without access to the original source code.
On top of the subsystems are a set of programs, tools,
and utilities designed to provide a mechanism for
building, configuring, viewing, and simulating applications in a
generic way. These tools will work with any RTE-compliant
application, regardless of the underlying technology. They provide
a mechanism for innovators and service teams to get direct access
to the underlying framework and allow for rapid application
development and prototyping.
Aspen Calc
Integration
The Aspen Process Controller supports input and output
calculations based on Aspen's powerful Aspen Calc. You can define
multi-line calculations using your own formula libraries in the
easily readable CalcScript language. Once you write a calculation,
you can automatically apply it to all the independent or dependent
variables in the controller. When you import an existing Aspen
DMCplus or Aspen Apollo controller the old calc language, it is
automatically translated to the new calc language.
Unified
Display
All on-line content is delivered via the Production
Control Web Server (PCWS). The PCWS is a browser-based
graphics console system for operators and engineers to use in
operating and maintaining controllers, inferentials, and automated
testing applications. It serves as an alternative to DCS-resident
graphics. Built on web-server architecture, its displays are
automatically generated based on controller/tester configuration;
no manual screen building is required. This minimizes the time
required to build, modify, and test applications. Any PC on the
control network may have access to the controllers (or testing
applications) based on the authorization provided by the
administrator of the Production Control view server.
ACP Key Features
- Integrated data collection, viewing,
conditioning, slicing, and transforms
- Integrated model viewing, merging,
convolution, and transforms
- Integrated sub-space model
identification
- Integrated controller configuration and
tuning
- Integrated simulation running against
either a model or historical data
- Integrated tag browser
- Tag templates to simplify configuring
plant IO connections
- Real-time online server
- Automatic short-term history for
applications
- Automatic snapshots of online
applications
- Direct IO support for Cim-IO, OPC and
Aspen Process Data
- Configurable role-based
security
- Controllers deployed directly from the
desktop; no manual file transfer
- Automatic controller change report on
redeploy
- Application history and snapshots
easily downloaded directly to the desktop for simulation and
troubleshooting