Equipment Arbitration in a Process Control System.

摘要

A distributed process control system and method for arbitrating equipment ownership conflicts in a process plant, the system comprises: a plurality of control modules 150, 250 or objects representing various process control entities or devices within a process control system; wherein a first object requests 156 to acquire ownership over a second process control entity; a second object associated with the second entity determines whether the second entity is available to be acquired by the first object and allows ownership of the second entity by the first object when the second entity is available. Preferably each entity is represented by an arbitration token and requests for ownership are represented as arbitration data tokens which are placed in an arbitration queues. Preferably there are several different queues corresponding to different status of an entity such as pending request 152, 252, pending acquired 151, 251, owned by 154, 254, owned equipment 153, 253.