Honeywell PlantCruise by Expert C300 Controller

Honeywell PlantCruise by Expert C300 Controller

Basic Overview

Honeywell's C300 controller is PlantCruise by Expert ®  The platform provides powerful and robust control functions. Its core is the field validated Deterministic Control Execution Environment (CEE) core software, which uses the easy-to-use and intuitive engineering tool Control Builder to configure and load control strategies. The C300 controller hardware adopts an innovative Series 8 exterior design, which has unique advantages in space saving, installation, and maintenance, and can be configured with redundancy by adding an additional identical hardware module.

Main advantages

Improve engineering efficiency: With a rich library of features and a seamless and intuitive user environment, it facilitates the creation and implementation of control strategies.

Maximizing process runtime: With powerful diagnostic capabilities and complete hardware redundancy, it reduces maintenance work and minimizes downtime to the greatest extent possible.

Reduce production costs: By implementing flexible and efficient control strategies, online migration, and efficient hardware processing capabilities, production costs can be reduced.

Core functions

Control Execution Environment (CEE)

Support ISA S88.01 batch standard, integrate sequences with devices, enable devices to track sequence status and perform pre configured operations based on status, reducing the complexity of handling abnormal situations.

The execution cycle of the control strategy can be set within the range of 50 milliseconds to 2000 milliseconds. Users can modify or add new strategies to existing strategies without interrupting the execution of other control strategies by the controller, and can fully control the execution order of functional blocks within the control strategy and the execution order of multiple control strategies.

Function block support

The functional blocks that control the execution environment support continuous control, logic based control, sequential control, and model-based control. Each functional block contains rich predefined functions, such as alarm limits and priorities, various control algorithms, and maintenance statistics, all of which are configurable parameters. Function blocks are linked together in the control module to perform specific control tasks, providing a foundation for efficient control engineering.

Data communication

Parameters provide access to various information in the controller, which can be used throughout the entire Expert system. Each parameter is protected from accidental changes through a secure access level, and some parameters can only be changed offline. Communication is based on anomaly reporting and publish subscribe mode, accessing data only when needed to avoid data duplication and efficiently utilize communication bandwidth.

Engineering environment

Control Builder is a control engineering and maintenance tool that controls the execution environment, simplifying configuration through a graphical user interface and predefined functional blocks, and improving the work efficiency of control engineers. Control engineers do not need to build standard functional blocks from scratch to enable and modify these features, and can also use embedded objects such as text, documents, or web links to add document descriptions to control policies.

On-line monitor

After loading the control strategy into the C300 controller, engineers can use the same graphical interface to monitor the strategy online, which helps validate the control strategy or troubleshoot process issues. Control or maintenance engineers can directly modify parameters from the engineering environment without the need for an operator interface.

Controller based model predictive tuning (ProfitLoop)

ProfitLoop is a patented algorithm from Honeywell that provides single input/single output model prediction function blocks, which are included in the standard C300 controller function block library. It has the operational simplicity and computational efficiency of standard PID function blocks, while providing tight and robust control, which can improve process stability by up to 30%. A simple model for the creation process of ProfitLoop, which predicts the impact of control actions on process (controlled) variables, can predict future process behavior, and accurately determine the adjustment required to achieve the expected control objectives of the process.

Custom Algorithm Blocks (CABs)

Custom algorithm blocks are similar in purpose and structure to the native feature blocks included in Control Builder, but have user-defined algorithms and data structures. CABs are developed using Visual Basic integrated into Control Builder. The C300 controller supports executing CABs in the Expert LX, greatly reducing the workload required to create complex control strategies that require a robust control environment provided by the C300.