Intelligent Control Rooms

When late at night in the control room of a petroleum refinery, more than thirty monitoring screens suddenly flashing warning signals at the same time, have you ever thought about how much stability is needed behind the computing center to support these critical data? This is precisely the proposition that we have been plowing into the field of intelligent control room for fifteen years to focus on solving – those seemingly calm industrial-grade computers, in fact, always in the electromagnetic interference, dust infiltration and sudden voltage fluctuations in a silent battle. Last year for a coastal nuclear power control center customized dual-redundant system is a typical case: the use of fully enclosed aluminum alloy armored structure of the industrial control machine, not only through the IEC 62443 level 3 certification, but also in the typhoon season, humid salt spray environment to achieve the record of 270 consecutive days of zero downtime, which in the industry is known as the “impossible task”.

Our team of engineers recently made an exciting discovery: in the industrial control program designed for the intelligent water control room, the VGA interface with special electromagnetic shielding coating has reduced the incidence of screen snowflake phenomenon by 92%. This detailed innovation stems from a deep understanding of the control room scene – when the operator needs to simultaneously view the SCADA system, video surveillance and three-dimensional simulation interface, the industrial control machine of the multi-screen heterogeneous synchronization capabilities directly related to the emergency response speed. Like a rail transit control center project last year, we successfully controlled the decoding delay of 12-channel 4K video streams within 3 frames through the custom-developed PCIe expansion module, which is equivalent to a golden 8-second decision-making time for the dispatcher.

You may not realize that the unassuming industrial computer in the corner of the control room may be running multi-million dollar algorithms. For example, the edge computing node we customized for a smart grid not only meets Class I Div 2 explosion-proof certification, but also has a built-in real-time load prediction model. When the system detects that an area is about to be overloaded, it automatically triggers a three-tier emergency plan like a seasoned commander, making the entire process two orders of magnitude faster than traditional SCADA systems. This ability to deeply integrate industrial computing with intelligent decision-making is the core code for the evolution of the new generation of control rooms.