A System-Level Synthesis Approach to Industrial Process Control Design

Multiprocessing can be considered the most characteristic common property of complex digital systems. Due to the more and more complex tasks to be solved for fulfilling often conflicting requirements (cost, speed, energy and communication efficiency, pipelining, parallelism, the number of component processors, etc.), the so called heterogeneous multiprocessing architectures (HMA) have become unavoidable. The component processors of such systems may be not only general purpose CPUs or cores, but also DSPs, GPUs, FPGAs and other custom hardware. A high degree of similarity can be observed between HMAs and modern distributed industrial process control systems as well. In both HMA design and process control design, existing solutions are often extended and reused intuitively to shorten the design time, even though this does not guarantee advantageous results. These trial and error experiments would result in unnecessarily expensive and redundant system architectures. Therefore, the rapid development in this field has resulted in new and task-oriented system-level synthesis (SLS) methods supporting the designer in finding, optimizing and evaluating the proper HMAs and eliminating the intuitive steps in the synthesis procedure as far as possible. This paper presents an adaptation of an existing SLS method for industrial process control system design. Analyzing, evaluating and comparison of the adapted SLS results are also illustrated on a concrete industrial process control design process as a benchmark.