The challenge of CIM in the process industries

In today's highly competitive worldwide environment, manufacturing plants in the U.S. need to use all the tools available to maintain control of cost, yield, and quality in their processes. Computer-integrated manufacturing is offering those tools to the discrete product manufacturing plants. Whether or not they provide the same benefits to the operation of continuous process plants is a key question in these times. This paper reviews the promise of CIM, areas of automation, the long-range goals of process plants, and the objectives of a CIM system. Open systems interconnections, the integration of distributed control systems, as well as the interoperation of CIM systems with process control systems are examined along with real-time database interconnections. The impact of this new technology on the existing processes and the culture of the plant's people will be discussed, and, in conclusion, some guidelines for integrating distributed control systems with the high level of performance offeref by the emerging CIM technology will be presented.