Wireless and Real-Time Industrial Process Control

There are different kinds of applications running in a process plant, ranging from auxiliary to critical. They are categorized into three groups, Class C applications for monitoring, Class B applications for control, and Class A applications for safety. As a new technology, wireless sees its early deployment in monitoring rather than controlling. And the early wireless devices are sensors rather than actuators. Most of the wireless network applications at the device level are sensing for logging and monitoring. Although work is underway to apply wireless to control applications, wide spread use of wireless in control applications and safety systems is still some time off. While wireless technology needs to advance to tackle the industrial real-time challenges, the traditional process control application also deserve a second look. In this chapter we discuss the challenges of applying wireless in process control in general, and our preliminary study on adapting closed-loop control for wireless communications.