ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a novel WirelessHART hardware-in-the-loop simulator (WH-HILS). The developed WH-HILS requires only a computer, wireless nodes and a gateway, thus it can be considered a mobile platform for investigation of WirelessHART networked control systems for industrial process control and monitoring applications. One of the key challenges for applying any novel control techniques to an industrial process plant is the actual proof-of-concept using the algorithms. It is well known that not all process industries are available for testing and trials of the newly developed algorithms. Thus, hardware-in-the-loop simulation is a potential approach to close the gap between academic and industrial applications. The chapter describes and justifies the selection of communication medium mainly between the computer and the gateway. Although the WirelessHART gateway supports three protocols for communication with computer, namely serials 1 and 2, and local area network (LAN) cable. LAN interface is selected as it has the highest reliability.
