Hands-On Industrial Internet of Things

DCS

From the perspective of the I-IoT data flow, DCSes are very similar to PLCs, so all the previously analyzed strengths and weaknesses also apply in this case. There are just a few differences to underline, which are listed as follows:

• The architecture of the DCS is natively organized hierarchically. This means that in industrial plants where the automation systems mainly use DCSes, we don't find many of them and they are typically supplied by the same vendor. For example, in a medium-sized refinery, we might have three or four DCSes that manage the whole plant.
• The DCS plays the double role of controller and SCADA system. Many also have an integrated Historian natively connected to the DCS controllers. This helps to select the data to ...