ABSTRACT- Tank Gauging by DCS (Distributed Control Sys-
tem) is much more than just automated inventory manage-
ment, it's about having more control over your fuelling op-
eration, collecting accurate information from your sites with
less effort and allowing you to make better decisions about
your assets. The DCS is being widely used in Power, Steel
manufacturing, Oil and Gas, and Petrochemicals for moni-
toring, advance process control, regulatory and sequential
control and various other functions. DCS is operated either
in single mode and or it is interfaced with other systems
such as PLC, SCADA, and Etc for enhanced functionality.
Developing Distributed Control System is a major industrial
concern since those systems are more and more complex
and involved in many safety critical application fields. This
paper focuses on an innovative and intelligent DCS for Tank
Gauging Control system that has been designed, imple-
mented and commissioned in large tank farm oil terminal
after case study in international standards. The main scopes
of DCS are described in this paper.
I. INTRODUCTION
Distributed Control Systems (DCS) are of developing
significance as they are fixed in many safety critical in-
dustrial applications: Oil and Gas, civil aircraft, nuclear
power plant, etc. so a lot of activity in this field has been
dedicated to ensuring and improving HW and SW relia-
bility. Further to SW development, Fault Avoidance has
considered, but Fault Tolerance, an important issue: con-
strained design process, intensive simulation and testing
and even formal methods [1]- [4] are good solution for
this subject. Beside control systems are often distributed
for wholly clear reasons of fault-tolerance, performance,
and sensor/actuator location. Distributed Control Systems
(DCS) are hard to design, debug, test and formally verify.
Those difficulties are closely related to a lack of global
vision of a system when designing it. Most of DCS are
organized as several periodic processes, with nearly the
same period, but without common clock, and which
communicate by means of shared memory through serial
links or field busses [5]. This class of DCS is quite clear-
ly an important one in the field and thus deserves special
attention. During the last decade, the synchronous ap-
proach [4] has been successfully and widely used for the
development of such distributed control systems. Based
on clean mathematical principles, one of its salient bene-
fits is its ability to support formal design and formal veri-
fication methods [6]. Halevi and Ray [7] consider a con-
tinuous-time plant and discrete-time controller and ana-
lyze the integrated communication and control system
using a discrete-time approach. Nilsson [8] also analyzes
