Advanced digital automation systems can provide well documented benefits to industrial manufacturers in terms of increased productivity, improved resource use efficiency and lower environmental emissions. In order to sustain these benefits the automation systems require support and maintenance. Typically, this support relies on physical access to the systems, often provided by experienced engineers who need to travel to the industrial site. Remote access has the potential to increase significantly the productivity of support engineers and as a result enhance the performance of the manufacturing sites. By eliminating the need for travel to remote locations, support companies and multi-national operators with centralised engineering groups can reduce their environmental impact, increase productivity and effectiveness and increase employee inclusivity. This benefit is amplified significantly by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, providing remote access to industrial control systems brings associated risk compared with a physically isolated control system domain. This project will generate a reference architecture for secure remote access. It will then subject this architecture to a detailed and rigorous risk assessment. The goal is to provide an appropriate reference design for the operators of manufacturing processes to properly configure their systems architectures and procedures as well as guidance on how to assess and mitigate the risk associated with their own installations.

Cooperative Distributed Model Predictive Control

We intend to develop and then embed within a control device, the code for a new process control strategy. Manufacturing plants typically consist of linked unit operations that are connected through a network of material, energy, and information streams. Because the unit operations are interlinked, it creates the potential for savings through material recycle, energy integration and overall feed or yield optimisation. However, because subsystems are often controlled independently, the potential efficiency gains are lost. Our innovation will enable us to capture these efficiency gains; with our solution, each sub-system will have a separate controller, which enables us to preserve simplicity, but each controller will be aware of network interactions between subsystems and will cooperate with other controllers in the network to ensure that a plant-wide objective is achieved. This new technology, which will require solving a number of technical challenges to create, will be applicable to a range of manufacturing plants that employ continuous processes including; the chemical, food processing, and pulp & paper industries. If successful, the benefits delivered to clients include improvements in productivity, reductions in energy consumption and improvements in product quality.