Perhaps the network should be called "IET Process Control and Automation Network"



Revised IET Process Control and Automation Network Description:

This community has been established to represent all those with an active interest in Process Control and Automation. It will be relevant to those involved with the design, implementation, construction, development, integration, analysis and understanding of process control systems and their operating environments.



I don't think you can completely separate process control algorithm design from the complexity, reliability, testability and cost of the whole system within which they are designed to operate. This includes the design of the computational platform they run on. (Computational platforms of increasing complexity being for example - simple bespoke state-machine style firmware running on a dedicated micro-controller, simple proprietary PLC OS or full-blown preemptive multi-tasking operating system).



As flexibility and complexity increases year on year, it becomes ever more difficult to design and build reliable, dependable, robust and safe process control systems. It seems that opportunity to decrease system development costs are being taken at the expense of long term robustness and reliability. Process control system complexity itself has to be controlled and partitioned in the right way to maintain and improve testability, maintainability and reliability.



I think the complexity escalation problem has hit engineers like a tsunami in the last 20 years, especially with the advent of the Internet and the year on year increase in the flexibility, complexity and processing power of cheap computer hardware. As a result hackers, viruses and computer worms (such as Stuxnet) can seemingly get anywhere they please now in the digital world, to monitor, destroy or subvert ever larger classes of process control system. (The complexity tsunami is now reaching our electricity and gas meters, our voting systems etc., and as a community we need to get an intellectual grip of the problem before it washes us all away).



I want to start talking about getting to grips with the complexity problem, especially in regards to designing reliable and safe process control systems for Generation IV nuclear reactors, especially molten salt nuclear reactors. 

Perhaps the network should be called "IET Process Control and Automation Network"



Revised IET Process Control and Automation Network Description:

This community has been established to represent all those with an active interest in Process Control and Automation. It will be relevant to those involved with the design, implementation, construction, development, integration, analysis and understanding of process control systems and their operating environments.



I don't think you can completely separate process control algorithm design from the complexity, reliability, testability and cost of the whole system within which they are designed to operate. This includes the design of the computational platform they run on. (Computational platforms of increasing complexity being for example - simple bespoke state-machine style firmware running on a dedicated micro-controller, simple proprietary PLC OS or full-blown preemptive multi-tasking operating system).



As flexibility and complexity increases year on year, it becomes ever more difficult to design and build reliable, dependable, robust and safe process control systems. It seems that opportunity to decrease system development costs are being taken at the expense of long term robustness and reliability. Process control system complexity itself has to be controlled and partitioned in the right way to maintain and improve testability, maintainability and reliability.



I think the complexity escalation problem has hit engineers like a tsunami in the last 20 years, especially with the advent of the Internet and the year on year increase in the flexibility, complexity and processing power of cheap computer hardware. As a result hackers, viruses and computer worms (such as Stuxnet) can seemingly get anywhere they please now in the digital world, to monitor, destroy or subvert ever larger classes of process control system. (The complexity tsunami is now reaching our electricity and gas meters, our voting systems etc., and as a community we need to get an intellectual grip of the problem before it washes us all away).



I want to start talking about getting to grips with the complexity problem, especially in regards to designing reliable and safe process control systems for Generation IV nuclear reactors, especially molten salt nuclear reactors.