In the nineteenth century, during the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, machines were invented to mechanize the production of textiles and tools, and other such items. Industry emerged world as an important sector of human society. Production and transport processes gradually began to be carried out by machines rather than by human hands. In order to free human eyes and brains as much as possible from operating and monitoring machine processes, Industrial Control and Automation developed as industrial technology.
In the 1980s, industrial control systems only encompassed supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, and programmable logic controllers (PLC). As microprocessors and program- mable integrated circuits developed in the 1990s, industrial control systems began to incorporate computers. Computerized control systems are powerful and efficient, and thus have found more and more applications across many industries, such as electricity, water, oil and gas, chemical, trans- portation, and manufacturing. Computerized control systems are different from computer control systems. In a computer control system, the computer takes the role of a supervisor separate from the controlled objects. In contrast, a computerized control system incorporates hardware and software into the system to be controlled, thus creating a single unified system. In order to differentiate, the term the two “embedded control” is used for computerized control systems.
There are two important types of embedded controls; real-time control and distributed control. Both of these have extended the scope of industrial control applications significantly. Nowadays, real- time and distributed controls have become the governing control concepts and rationales of a vast range of systems, from medical instruments in hospitals to satellites in the sky.
This chapter discusses three important industrial control systems; embedded control systems, real- time control systems, and distributed control systems. This chapter goes through the principles and functions, the architectures and components, and the implementation techniques for each of the three control systems.