Modeling Goals and Functions of Control and Safety Systems - theoretical foundations and extensions of MFM
Activity Acronym:
Authors:
Morten Lind
Abstract:
Multilevel Flow Modeling (MFM) has proven to be an effective modeling
tool for reasoning about plant failure and control strategies and is currently
exploited for operator support in diagnosis [3, 4] and on-line alarm analysis
[6].
Previous MFM research was focussed on representing goals and functions
of process plants which generate, transform and distribute mass and energy
[10, 11]. However, only a limited consideration has been given to the
problems of modeling the control systems. Control functions are
indispensable for operating any industrial plant. But modeling of control
system functions has proven to be a more challenging problem than
modeling functions of energy and mass processes. The problems were
discussed by Lind [8, 9, 10] and tentative solutions has been proposed but
have not been investigated in depth until recently, partly due to the lack of
an appropriate theoretical foundation.
The purposes of the present report are to show that such a theoretical
foundation for modeling goals and functions of control systems can be
built from concepts and theories of action developed by Von Wright [23]
and to show how the theoretical foundation can be used to extend MFM
with concepts for modeling control systems. The theoretical foundations
has been presented in detail elsewhere by the present author [12, 14]
without the particular focus on modeling control actions and MFM adopted
here.
Keywords:
Multilevel Flow Modeling; control actions; safety systems; theoretical foundation