Requirements on the Industrial Balancing System

Let us now formulate capabilities a balancing system should have. It should be able to process, in an optimum way, the measured balance data and using the data, to set up well-arranged information about mass and energy flows and inventories in the given period. The analysis of the situation in a number of plants has shown that the following problems have to be solved  

Raw data needed for balancing comes seldom from one source. In practice, data present on many places in different forms must be gathered together. Typical sources of data are 

Due to short time which is usually available, data gathering must be well organised, the example of possible data organisation is in Fig. 13-2 (see also Fig. 2-9 in Chapter 2). 

Distributed Control System (DCS) communicates with the PC which is connected to the Local Area Network (LAN).The software running on the PC stores process data to the process database on the data server. Data which is not available from DCS enters manually from PCs located in individual plants. There can be also other sources of data (for example Laboratory Information Systems) which are not shown in the Fig. 13-2. After transferring data to the server, data are available to all users connected to the LAN. 

As many plants are not equipped with a DCS system, part of data must be entered manually. This fact stresses the importance of gross error detection and identification techniques available. 

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