DACS is a distribution and Application Control System. It has been designed for application in plants where the quantity of sensors that need to be monitored, the distance between them, and real time requests require a distributed strategy of acquisition and control.
DACS is a modular, VME bus system, that is made of one or several process cards called IOC (Input Output Controller). IOC is a complete Acquisition and Control Subsystem, with VME bus interface, a RISC SPARC CPU, A/D and D/A converter, etc., and a special hardware processor that allows the oversampling and processing of input data at high sampling rates. DACS uses UDP sockets with standard 10-Mbits Ethernet, and implements a protocol that guarantees the network determinism and the synchronism of data captured in different DACS. DACS software is designed with VxWorks 5.2 and is based on the periodic execution of a configuration. A configuration is made of several Functional Modules, the inputs and output of which are connected by the user in order to execute a certain functionality. This configuration can be downloaded via Ethernet from a remote computer.