Advanced Control System

The Advanced Control System (ACS).^[1] is an IBM process control program originally developed and designed, with Exxon, in the early 1970’s to automate two Esso refineries:

• Imperial Oil Strathcona refinery^[2], a start-up oil refinery located in Strathcona County adjacent to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and
• Antwerp oil refinery, a major revamp of the existing refinery at Antwerp, Belgium.  

Subsequently, ACS became an IBM program product, with IBM development and support continuing on through the 1980’s and 1990’s, and installations growing to number over 120 worldwide, in some 17 countries.  ACS controlled plants and refineries across several industries, including: petroleum, chemical, pulp and paper^[3], mining, steel, glass, pharmaceutical, utilities, and gas distribution.  Some 45 years after the Strathcona and Antwerp installations, ACS is still in operation in at least 10 industrial plants across the globe.^[4][5]

ACS was designed to automatically perform process control functions to control thousands of plant process operations, with hundreds of operations being controlled each and every second ^[6].  This was achieved by ACS operating in conjunction with IBM’s Special Real Time Operating System (SRTOS)^[7][8][9] utilizing dual IBM mainframes (IBM System/360, IBM System/370) with IBM front-end processors (IBM System/7, IBM Series/1).  When first installed at the Strathcona refinery, ACS employed a pair of System 370/145 mainframes in order to provide a backup/failover capability, ensuring continuous operation in case the primary mainframe failed. Using a mainframe computer for process control allowed for integration of operational data with business systems^[10].

ACS software offered industrial plant customers leading-edge technologies, including:

• Second-by-second processing of process variable inputs, using various defined algorithms to generate output values, at a rate of 200-300 variables per second.  This enabled operation of very large, complex refineries^[11]
• Use of color graphic terminals to display process variable information, operating targets, performance and response graphs, and process schematics, greatly simplified complex tasks for both plant operators and engineers. Process control schematics provided simulated graphic displays from which operators could readily learn to monitor and control a plant^[12].
• Supervisory services to access process variable data, utilities to report process variable information and alarm history, and track functional changes to variables.

• Online forms to define process variables, general algorithms, and process commands without have to employ programming.
• Use of a front-end processor to provide an analog and digital read/write interface to various industrial plan instrumentation.
• Real time simulation of typical complex petrochemical processes ^[13][14][15]
• Automated scheduling, direction and control of the movement of products through refinery components and to external pipelines, storage tanks and ships (Oil Movements & Storage) ^[16][17][18].
  

ACS played a key role in process control education, where IBM partnered with various universities (e.g., University of Waterloo, Imperial College London, Purdue University, Tulane University, University of Notre Dame, etc.), to make ACS process control simulations available to their chemical engineering departments and students^{[19][20][21][22]}. In the past, process control courses were very theoretical, and the methodology could only be applied to very simple processes. ACS enabled support of theoretical process control lectures with real time simulations and control of typical petrochemical processes.

Control room at an early ACS petroleum refinery installation

References

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