The process computer has been put to practical use for abut a quarter century. It has acquired greater importance year by year and its application have spread over all the industrial fields. In the mid-1960s, Fuji Electric started development and has supplied many process computer systems. As an introduction to this special issue for the recent applications, this paper outlines the present status and trends of process computer systems (distributed systems, open systems and software productivity) and applications (electric power, utilities, the steel industry, FA and PA).

In the operation of a regional power system control center, the operator confronted by a large-scale or a complicated fault is required to have wide, sophisticated knowledge and technique and to make a quick, accurate decision. Fuji Electric developed and put in practice a computer system for regional power system control centers, which provides information in an easy form on a series of measures against fault occurrence to restoration, and which automatizes operations widely using AI, and also has a high-grade training system to learn restoration plans when a fault occurs.

This paper introduces large-scale centralized supervisory control systems supplied to Toyohashi Control Center and Okazaki Dispatching Center in Okazaki Branch, Chubu Electric Power Co., Inc. in 1990 and 1992. These systems have a distributed system configuration, realize high performance and high reliability, and also have same system configuration, realize high performance and high reliability, and also have substantial man-machine interfaces with a full-graphic CRT function. Advanced functions including automated preparation of operation procedures are provided. Both centers are operated satisfactorily controlling 118 switching stations.

The system of control centers in The Kansai Electric Co., Inc. has been improved by introducing computer control technology into daily work as well as into supervisory control. Fuji Electric has supplied Wakayama Control Center system for Wakayama Branch and Sano Control Center System for Osaka-Minami Branch, which will be put in operation in 1992.
In these systems, a new HDLC transmission type tele-control is fully used instead of conventional cyclic tele-control. This paper outlines the configuration and features of the systems.

As raised living increased dependence on electricity, diversified consumer's needs to the electric enterprise such as high-quality power, reliable supply, and varieties of menus have been come up, and higher services have been requested socially.
To meet these social requirements, electric power companies are striving for automation of distribution, particularly for remote control systems for switches.
This paper describes the trend of switch control systems and the latest trend of computer systems.

The operation of waterworks includes a field of maintenance engineering such as fault diagnosis of equipment and cause study of process error and some field of process control for which a numeric model cannot be made or a program is too much complicated to be used. To solve problems in these fields is an essential future subject to operate waterworks more rationally. This paper introduces examples of systems to which knowledge engineering is applied to solve these problems.

As water service spread widely, advanced maintenance and management for water conduits have been required, and there are a lot of needs for mapping systems.
This paper describes the system configuration, function and examples of facility information management system FMAPFILE developed by Fuji Electric as low-cost mapping system easy to be introduced into water service enterprises.

Fuji Electric has supplied a process computer system for the 4th of No.5 blast furnace of Kawasaki Steel Corp. Chiba Works. This paper describes an outline of a blast furnace operation control system and the feature of the supplied system.
This system uses A-80 for the computer and FA personal computers for a man-machine interface. Each is connected to the general-purpose LAN, and data transmission from the lower level is all through the LAN.
The system development was fully mechanized using YPS, OASYS. and zLotus.

Iron and steel corporations are required to save energy, to save manpower, to reduce lead time for products, to make multikind and small-quantity products, and to achieve high-quality management. The main points of steel-making processes and production management systems meeting the above requirements are to establish production methods to minimize in-process products between processes, to improve product quality, and to automatize the steel-making jobs.
This paper introduces the system configuration, software functions, and characteristic of production system for SICARTSA, Mexico.

With distributed control system application to instrumentation, process computer control in cement plants is demanded for high-grade control. Particularly required are the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to fields where automatic control by conventional auto-regression models is difficult and the structuring of CIM in combination with other control equipment. To meet these requirements, Fuji Electric has developed a system equipped as standard with advanced control such as AI and modern control theory and with a statistical analysis tool to identify plant models and improve accuracy.

Equipment investment should have optimum effect with a small amount of money, particularly when business lags. Further, the investment should be expandable in the future. To provide a means to meet the requirement, Fuji Electric developed the captioned system. Joining closely with a manufacturing system, this system has a learning function in the system and can be operated easily to customers'satisfaction.

EFPACS (Effective Fuji Picture Archiving and Communication System) is a system that manages enormous image data efficiently and supports total image diagnosis in the medical field.
This system has serial types of EFPACS-100, -500, and -1000 corresponding to system scales and is composed of function components; therefore, it can be introduced sequentially. This paper outlines the features and function of the system and recent applications including nonmedical ones.

Recent downsizing of computers has made hardware cheap and good in performance. As a result, it is an important subject to improve efficiency of computer software development. There are many approaches to this subject, one of which is the improvement of support packages, that is, to reduce the quantity of application program developments and to stabilize quality.
This paper describes our attitude and plan, and introduces data base packages for industrial fields and personal computer packages connecting with a minicomputer.