Industrial control systems

Industrial control system (ICS) is a general term that encompasses several types of control systems and associated instrumentation used in industrial production, including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, distributed control systems (DCS), and other smaller control system configurations such as programmable logic controllers (PLC) often found in the industrial sectors and critical infrastructures.

Industrial control systems are typically used in industries such as electrical, water, oil, gas and data.

Based on data received from remote stations, automated or operator-driven supervisory commands can be pushed to remote station control devices, which are often referred to as field devices. Field devices control local operations such as opening and closing valves and breakers, collecting data from sensor systems, and monitoring the local environment for alarm conditions.

Process control of large industrial plants has evolved through many stages. Initially, control would be from panels local to the process plant. However this required a large manpower resource to attend to these dispersed panels, and there was no overall view of the process. The next logical development was the transmission of all plant measurements to a permanently-manned central control room. Effectively this was the centralisation of all the localised panels, with the advantages of lower manning levels and easier overview of the process. Often the controllers were behind the control room panels, and all automatic and manual control outputs were individually transmitted back to plant in the form of pneumatic or electrical signals.

However, whilst providing a central control focus, this arrangement was inflexible as each control loop had its own controller hardware so system changes required reconfiguration of signals by re-piping or re-wiring. It also required continual operator movement within a large control room in order to monitor the whole process. With coming of electronic processors, high speed electronic signalling networks and electronic graphic displays it became possible to replace these discrete controllers with computer-based algorithms, hosted on a network of input/output racks with their own control processors. These could be distributed around plan and would communicate with the graphic displays in the control room. The concept of "distributed control" was realised.

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