DISTRIBUTED DIGITAL CONTROL AND MONITORING FOR POWER PLANTS.

Reliability, equipment modularity, simplicity of failure diagnostics, and the resultant ease of maintenance are all important criteria for the design of new monitoring and control systems for power plants. Recent technical breakthroughs in large-scale integrated circuits, solid-state memories, manufacturing techniques, etc. have significantly reduced the cost of digital computer hardware components. The microprocessor on a chip now makes the implementation of functionally distributed digital computer-based control and monitoring systems economically feasible. Furthermore, it is now economically feasible to use several microcomputers in a distributed digital control and monitoring configuration. Therefore, the work load of each microprocessor is significantly reduced.