In this chapter, we have looked at what an industrial process and an automated system are. We have identified the physical process, the control systems, and their interactions. The physical process is a combination of operations that act on entities that belong to the physical world and change some of their characteristics. The control system receives the information on the status of the process, elaborates it, and performs the required actions on the physical process. A more rigorous definition of process control and data acquisition systems has been also provided. We have identified and defined the different entities involved, which included devices, resources, data, events, and the interface.
Following this, we learned about the different kinds of industrial processes there are, distinguishing between continuous, semi-continuous, discrete, and batch processes. We also...