Automatic process control in continuous production processes is a combination of control engineering

and chemical engineering disciplines that uses industrial control systems to achieve a production level of
consistency, economy and safety which could not be achieved purely by human manual control. It is
implemented widely in industries such as oil refining, pulp and paper manufacturing, chemical
processing and power generating plants.

There is a wide range of size, type and complexity, but it enables a small number of operators to manage
complex processes to a high degree of consistency. The development of large automatic process control
systems was instrumental in enabling the design of large high volume and complex processes, which
could not be otherwise economically or safely operated.

The applications can range from controlling the temperature and level of a single process vessel, to a
complete chemical processing plant with several thousand control loops.

Early process control breakthroughs came most frequently in the form of water control devices.
Ktesibios of Alexandria is credited for inventing float valves to regulate water level of water clocks in the
3rd Century BC. In the 1st Century AD, Heron of Alexandria invented a water valve similar to the fill valve
used in modern toilets.[1]

Later process controls inventions involved basic physics principles. In 1620, Cornlis Drebbel invented a
bimetallic thermostat for controlling the temperature in a furnace. In 1681, Denis Papin discovered the
pressure inside a vessel could be regulated by placing weights on top of the vessel lid.[1] In 1745,
Edmund Lee created the fantail to improve windmill efficiency; a fantail was a smaller windmill placed
90° of the larger fans to keep the face of the windmill pointed directly into the oncoming wind.

With the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the 1760s, process controls inventions were aimed to
replace human operators with mechanized processes. In 1784, Oliver Evans created a water-powered
flourmill which operated using buckets and screw conveyors. Henry Ford applied the same theory in
1910 when the assembly line was created to decrease human intervention in the automobile production
process.[1]

For continuously variable process control it was not until 1922 that a formal control law for what we
now call PID control or three-term control was first developed using theoretical analysis, by Russian
American engineer Nicolas Minorsky.[2] Minorsky was researching and designing automatic ship
steering for the US Navy and based his analysis on observations of a helmsman. He noted the helmsman
steered the ship based not only on the current course error, but also on past error, as well as the current
rate of change;[3] this was then given a mathematical treatment by Minorsky.[4] His goal was stability,
not general control, which simplified the problem significantly. While proportional control provided
stability against small disturbances, it was insufficient for dealing with a steady disturbance, notably a
stiff gale (due to steady-state error), which required adding the integral term. Finally, the derivative
term was added to improve stability and control.

Process control of large industrial plants has evolved through many stages. Initially, control would be
from panels local to the process plant. However this required a large manpower resource to attend to
these dispersed panels, and there was no overall view of the process. The next logical development was
the transmission of all plant measurements to a permanently-manned central control room. Effectively
this was the centralisation of all the localised panels, with the advantages of lower manning levels and
easier overview of the process. Often the controllers were behind the control room panels, and all
automatic and manual control outputs were transmitted back to plant. However, whilst providing a
central control focus, this arrangement was inflexible as each control loop had its own controller
hardware, and continual operator movement within the control room was required to view different
parts of the process.

With the coming of electronic processors and graphic displays it became possible to replace these
discrete controllers with computer-based algorithms, hosted on a network of input/output racks with
their own control processors. These could be distributed around plant, and communicate with the
graphic display in the control room or rooms. The distributed control system was born.

The introduction of DCSs allowed easy interconnection and re-configuration of plant controls such as
cascaded loops and interlocks, and easy interfacing with other production computer systems. It enabled
sophisticated alarm handling, introduced automatic event logging, removed the need for physical
records such as chart recorders, allowed the control racks to be networked and thereby located locally
to plant to reduce cabling runs, and provided high level overviews of plant status and production levels.