The cost of production losses in the process industry makes plant availability the most critical factor when selecting a control system supplier. ECS/ControlCenter is therefore designed to be an

• Effective round-the-clock control system. This is proved by the
  product performance at 500+ cement plants worldwide.
• Efficient control engineering platform enabling the shortest commissioning
  time for greenfield projects as well as upgrade and retrofit projects.

Today, the ECS/ControlCenter platform is supported and integrated not only by the engineers of FLSmidth Automation in Denmark, but also by various teams and subsidiaries as well as cement producers and their associated engineering companies. This has been made possible through a sound and reliable product development strategy as well as worldwide support and training services.

The general characteristics of the ECS/ControlCenter for process automation are the following:

Hardware independent. ECS/ControlCenter is designed for easy integration with numerous hardware products  e.g. PLC & MCC to allow the user to freely choose the most suitable suppliers for the specific project. A configuration with main motors from one supplier and PLC's from another is an example where ECS/ControlCenter is highly advantageous as the overall integrating system.

Open and configurable. Being a platform for control system solutions, ECS/ControlCenter is an open environment that fulfils a wide range of requirements in terms of local regulations, group standardisation and equipment functionality. The configurable environment of the platform with its high degree of flexibility makes for customer satisfaction.

State-of-the-art. In step with continuous development of  hardware and software, ECS/ControlCenter is known to utilise not only the most recent but also the most reliable technologies in control system solutions.

Scalable. Scalability is a distinguishing characteristic of
ECS/ControlCenter. An ECS/ControlCenter server can be used to control a single department with only a few hundred I/Os.
The same server concept can later on be used to control additional production units or even the entire plant with high performance.

Only two ECS/ControlCenter servers interconnected in a redundant configuration are sufficient for complete control and supervision of all departments in a two-line 4000 tpd cement production plant. The two servers handle the I/O task to the process, the entire supervision task for all operator stations of the two lines, the internal data processing, logging and event handling, and any possible engineering and configuration task for the control systems. The two servers are simultaneously active in all the control tasks, and update each other with any changes that might occur in each of them. Thus a shutdown of any of these servers will not affect the production of this plant.  A number of add-on applications for process and quality control are also integrated into the control system. The underlying PLC type for this project is Siemens, however the same configuration could be applied for an Allen-Bradley, ABB, or Modicon type of PLC system.

ECS/ControlCenter consists of several functional building blocks that constitute the added-value of the product for control systems:
The I/O Center is a very powerful kernel of the ECS/ControlCenter to handle the entire input-output communication with the plant. The Insight Center contains a number of functions and features for efficient control and supervision of the plant. The functions within the Engineering Center make the control systems the strongest and most flexible platform of its type. Last but not least, the Security Center has a number of security-oriented applications to protect the system against unauthorised access. All these functions can be customised to the specifications of a plant or company regarding behaviour, user-interface, etc. Today major cement companies have their own libraries of customised functionalities. ECS/ControlCenter customers can also benefit from a wide range of technical support and services to maximise utilisation of their control system.