Industrial Controls and Automation

CERN’s unique know-how in designing, building, commissioning, operating and maintaining complex industrial controls systems.

CERN's Know-How

  • Development, operation, commissioning and diagnostics of high complex, high availability, reliable industrial controls applications
  • Continuous Process Control support for multi vendor, multi device, highly automated controls infrastructure
  • Towards virtual commissioning scenarios (digital twins) and formal verification methods for controls

Facts & Figures

  • 600 PCLs 200 OPC-U A 90 FEC Control Devices 
  • >200 TB controls data stored annually
  • 600 SCADA Industrial Control Applications
  • 10M HW 1/0 of control points

Value Proposition

Read more about Industrial Controls and Automation here. 

Key Competences

Open continuous process controls

Expertise in designing and implementing strategies for highly complex industrial controls environments incorporating multi-vendor devices. Automation of the controls processes in an open, vendor agnostic environment. 

Specifications

  • Open architecture for distributed control and automation, applying object oriented techniques to process control
  • Coherent approach & integration for all three controls layer
  • Standards based approach. ISA-88 / IEC-61512 / IEC-61499
  • Use of Formal Methods for PCL code verification
  • Modeling & Simulation techniques 
  • Virtual commissioning
  • Digital twin
  • Machine learning and analytics for predictive maintenance of control systems

Key Applications

Unified industrial control system

UNICOS (UNified Industrial Control System) is a CERN-made framework to develop industrial control applications. It is a standards based, vendor independent framework for controls applications. Provides Supervision and Controls layers for highly complex heterogeneous device controls applications.

Control and monitoring platform

A modular Java framework called C2MON for large-scale industrial monitoring and control solutions, with all core functionalities adaptable to a wide variety of monitoring systems. A highly scalable heterogeneous platform for many Big Data and IoT scenarios.

Controls middleware for vital services

Controls Middleware (CMW) is software that controls CERN’s accelerator complex. Its function is to provide vital services and interoperability between heterogeneous complex distributed systems whilst hiding the complexity of such systems from the users.