Accident prevention by control system reconfiguration

The control system of a process plant, as other physical systems, can break up or fail to function satisfactorily, which means that control objectives are not achieved. In order to avoid the shut downs or accidents related to the control objectives unachieved, an analysis of both the process and control system must be performed. This paper introduces the use of functional modeling for control system reconfiguration. An extension of the Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) methodology is presented; this extension provides the functionality that analyzes the control system status as well as possible reconfigurations in a semiautomatic and consistent way, which means to enhance systems’ autonomy and robustness. In order to be able to have an integrated model an open, neutral, domain and platform independent language is needed. The Systems Modeling Language (SysML) complies with these requirements and can be applied to develop MFM models.