Industry 4.0 and basic principles of a new architecture for control of power plants processes

The results of the level analysis of intellectuality and efficiency of up-to-date automated process control systems (APCS) based on software and hardware systems (SHS) are presented. It was demonstrated that, despite the widespread implementation of modern software and hardware systems during the construction of new APCS and upgrading the existing ones for thermal power plants (TPP), improvement of the process control quality, optimization of their modes and parameters take place generally at the equipment and power unit level and to a far lesser extent – at the power plant level and as a result – insufficient level of automation and low technical and economic efficiency. Another conclusion from the performed analysis – when implementing control algorithms in the APCS based on the up-to-date SHS, their wide data and software capabilities are not fully used. The main ways of further APCS improvement for the purpose of further increasing of their efficiency and the level of intelligence of SHS based APCS of power plants are presented. The possibility of their implementation is considered with application of the basic principles laid in the concept Industry 4.0. The possible economic effect from the implementation of the proposed solutions for increasing the intelligence and efficiency of the SHS based APCS was assessed. A brief description of the configuration of the proposed SHS based control system is given