HIGH AVAIBILITY FOR COMPUTERS RUNNING HMI SOFTWARE – ZERO DOWNTIME

The HMI (Human Machine Interface) software running on computer COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) has brought to the industry a higher cost-effective ratio and has become a widespread technology in industrial process control. Ensuring that this system is always available is a large industrial concern, since these computers oversee continuous reactors, evaporators, spray dryers, etc. The control room becomes the pulsating center of the plant and ensures the loss of only a few minutes of operation. With the advent of virtualization, this system has become reliable and feasible for industrial process control environment. This article aims to show a project that integrates PLC (Programmable Logic Controllers) to servers (Process Control) with HMI/OPC remotely connected to virtualized thin clients located in control rooms. This virtualized environment generates a solution with near zero downtime and ensures that in the event of disasters, the recovery of the entire system environment can be done in minutes.