Desenvolvimento de ferramenta computacional embarcada para simulação de processos industriais

Abstract

The use of simulation has in recent years a growing demand in industrial applications. Globalization has brought increased competitiveness and has made companies more concerned about improving the quality of their products, reducing project implementation time, optimizing resources, among others. In this context, there is a demand for tools that help in the improvement of processes and make it possible to simulate control alternatives in a simple and reliable way. However, for the tools available in the market, there is a great difficulty in measuring the impacts caused by problems intrinsic to the transmission medium such as time-varying communication delays, slow and non-periodic updating, among other types of interferences that cause great difficulty to the performance of industrial controllers in process control. We should also observe that most university laboratories do not have a large diversity of field devices and industrial plants to use in practical classes. Thus, the application of computational methods in dynamic simulators provides to student a closer experience with industrial equipment and allows student to do any type of experiment without security restrictions. This way, what was intended in this work is to develop an embedded functional block independent of technology, which allows simulating industrial processes of different characteristics considering the network communication delays involved. In order to validate this objective, we presented experimental results with the embedded Modbus protocol and a prototyping platform.