Educational Simulators for Industrial Process Control - Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Application - page 154

In this project, two basic model libraries have been developed, one for process
units and another one to design control structures. The library of mathematical models
of process units is based on first principles and the degree of detail of the models is
imposed for the purpose each the simulator. So, distributed or globalized parameter
models can be found; fast dynamics can be explicitly modeled or simplified using
static equations; empiric equations can be used to reduce the model complexity, …
In order to use the EcosimPro simulation models from a GUI different from the
experimental view, EcosimPro disposes of an add-in to execute models from Excel
and another module to execute models from MATLAB. But, it isn't enough to com-
municate the EcosimPro simulation models with our GUI (EDUSCA), because the
EcosimPro simulation models don't hold OPC communications.
However an OPC server can be created by adding to the C++ simulation code the
communication routines provided by the OPC standard. Then, the simulation program
is converted to an OPC server can be accessed from any OPC client. This process can
be automated. In our case, an application, CreaOPC [18] has been developed to set up
OPC servers from the C++ sources files generated by EcosimPro (Fig. 13).

Fig. 13. OPC server simulation generation

5 Conclusions

A program with a library of simulation modules of typical control problems has been
briefly exposed. This library deals with normal control problems (PID tuning; cas-
cade, feedforward and ratio control) but, additionally, it includes other type of control
problems (selective, override, split-range control) and special control strategies to
guarantee security and quality process requirements. A variety of processes are consi-
dered, from the simplest ones, as tanks or heat exchangers, to the more complex ones,
as boilers or distillation columns.