Control of safety critical heavy industrial applications

Abstract

The paper summarizes the most important advances of the used crane control technology in perspective of semi-automatic/automatic operation of Electrical Overhead Travelling (EOT) cranes. Those cranes are often used in the heavy industrial environment, typically steel-mill applications and crane container handling. Most of them need sensor and/or sensorless technology in order to realize specific tasks with very strict safety categorized regulations for most electro-mechanical motions. Operation in harsh environment has significant impact during the crane's manipulation phase of crane control devices. Faster and more productive cranes demand a highly efficient Real-Time Controller (RTC), as well as overriding system, to control actuators in the closed loop. Monitoring and production statistic as functional subset of the Real Time (RT) controller is not presented in details in this paper.