Typical control chains

The aim of this article is to help you analyze the problems that arise in industrial control and, by presenting different types of real installations, to provide some answers. As installations become increasingly complex, it becomes necessary to represent them by means of a diagram comprising different blocks, following a decomposition / recomposition procedure. High-performance mathematical tools can be used to explain these blocks, and through them the overall behavior, but first we need to select suitable blocks and define the links between them.

The examples presented here should help the non-specialist user to master the essential choices. They should also make it easier to understand a rich but sometimes ambiguous vocabulary, and to delimit functions that are often embedded in sets, in other words, to distinguish between operational and material separations. In this qualitative approach, mathematical tools will only be mentioned, but not discussed.