A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering, School of Advanced Technologies

Automation in manufacturing system has been rising in complexity especially the devices in sensory and actuator level. Communication between computer controlled devices is an essential part of today's automated system. Totally integrated automation is becoming one of the most important areas of technology. Integrated software is now becoming available which is relatively easy to configure and maintain the control hardware, programming the logical conditions of PLCs using graphical interface by human machine interface. The need for producing consistently high quality of products has driven manufacturers to all kinds of automations, which can produce less expensive products of high quality. This research concerns with a development of the continuous process control, which will be implement by using 3 continuous process systems as the case study. The processes are polymer production, petroleum storage system and slurry press process. The polymer production process will be implemented and analyzed for creation of the template model for development steps in system planning. The other two processes will follow the step planning which has been created. The study of automation for continuous process control system is the first task for the planning of the system. The sequence of the process is also important to understand before starting the project. After the project has been operated for a while, system maintenance and updating are the obligation. The data and the historical plan are very useful for this. But most of the time, the engineer is incapable to handle all of the system, resulting in waste of rework time and cost. Good planning of the process can minimize the unwanted events. Use of the process planning step developed in this research will assist not only the beginner but also experienced engineer in their work.

Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology 2000