Just as businesses in the manufacturing, retail, and other sectors are tightening their belts and looking for opportunities to optimize their operations, the electric power industry is taking a long, hard look at its operations. Like never before, utilities are keeping a close eye on the bottom line, looking for opportunities to boost profitability without sacrificing safety, reliabilityCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, and availability. Increasingly, simulation is one of the solutions power generators are using to help mee

　　An effective simulation program can help ease transitions from analog (and even pneumatic) to more modern control architectures -- just as Con Ed operators made the change from conventional boilers to gas turbine combined cycle generation.

　　Surprised It's understandable, since simulators have been used as a training tool in the power generation industry for decades. While they certainly served their purpose well, they admittedly left much to be desired from a practical perspective.
　　For one thing, they were somewhat difficult and costly to maintain. Consider for a moment that if a utility wanted to use a simulator as an effective training tool for its power plant operators, it was necessary to acquire controllers, workstations, and associated logic identical to that used in the actual control system. Then, in order to keep the simulation accurate and realistic, every time the DCS (distributed control system) was expanded or upgradedCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, a similar investment had to be made in the simulator. And because the simulator had a full set of duplicate hardware, raids by control system engineers looking for spare parts happened from time to time.
　　Then vs. now
　　Technological advancements—combined with today's market realities—have coalesced控制工程网版权所有, fueling simulation's expanded role and subsequently, its contribution to enhanced operator performance控制工程网版权所有, more efficient workforce deploymentCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, and increased plant efficiency.
　　The adoption of virtual tech