Process Automation

Process Automation

GENIA (Integrated Automation Environment) is an investigation team inside the Systems Engineering and Automatic Control Area of the University of Oviedo.

GENIA is born to join and strengthen several lecturer's efforts worried about Automation teaching aspects. By the end of 1996 this investigation team produced two software’s: Prosimax: "Industrial Process Simulator" and Mediss: "Sequential Automatism Design" and one hardware, Simdih-1: "Simulator and Trainer to Help with Automatism Debugging and Design". These products come to fill in the teachers needs as well as the Engineer Companies that develop general automation projects.

The University of Oviedo in collaboration with Siemens S.A. deliver and commercialise these products since then. Secondary Schools, Universities, Unemployment offices, Private Schools, Engineer Companies are the main receptors of our products.

An important effort has been made to the stabilisation of the team and to increase the number of equipment and software applications in the automation environment, covering the three main parts involved in any automated system: operative component made up of I/O interfaces, pre-actuators, actuators and sensors; control component that comprises controllers: PLC's, micrcontrollers, digital regulators, industrial computers, etc. and the supervision and exploitation component of the system, i.e. the SCADA’s.

Our current goal is to achieve the whole integration of all these components, applications and equipment. Doing so, you would be able to develop all aspects of an automation project, from the control program, the debugging of that program, to the supervision of the process, in a very flexible way and from within the same environment. That integration must turn round the communication of signal values among applications over an heterogeneous (office and/or industrial) network.

Our main research goals are:

Industrial computer science, supervision and process control.

Process simulation is one of the basic fields of research interest inside GENIA. Our goal is to achieve a generic and open industrial process simulator with which you can develop new objects behaviours without needing to program a single line of code.

Design of automatisms: GRAFCET: The programming of automatons is a very important task. From our point of view we have to bet on methodologies that make easy and standard this issue. The most important one by the moment is GRAFCET.

Design and Development of applications and equipment to improve Automation teaching.

Integration of different applications and tools to achieve the previous goal. We are very worried about teaching. We want to improve our students skills. So we have developed several software tools to help us giving hands-on classes. This way we supply the laboratories with cheaper tools that make it possible to all students to us the same tools. We have published two articles about how to organise practicum classes using hardware already in the labs and new software to complement them.

Domotics. The domotics is another field of interest for us. We are investigating new domotic solutions using generic automatons istead of other more expensive and complex solutions.

In the following sections you can see a short description of those tools.

Main Research Groups