Process Control Systems Engineering

Process Control Systems (PCS) are distributed control systems (DCS) that are specialized to meet the requirements of the process industries. Many processes and plants of that domain have high safety and availability requirements, are instrumented with a large number of sensors and actuators and show a rather high degree of automation at least in standard operation regimes. There are remarkable differences and cross-discipline interdependencies between chemical-physical properties of the substances, procedures, unit operations, equipment, instrumentation and control strategies. This results in the observation that there hardly any two plants that are identical, even if the products are interchangeable.