DCS usually adopts hierarchical hierarchical structure, each level is composed of several subsystems, each subsystem to achieve some specific limited target, form a pyramid.

Is the life of the development of DCS reliability, to ensure the high reliability of DCS is mainly have three measures: one is widely used in the high reliability of hardware equipment and production process; Secondly, redundancy technology is widely used. Thirdly, the fault tolerance, fault self-diagnosis and automatic processing of the system are widely realized in software design. MTBF of most distributed control systems today can be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of hours.

It USES control dispersion, operating and management focus on the basic design idea, USES the multi-layer hierarchical structure, cooperation, autonomy. Its main feature is its centralized management and decentralized control. At present, DCS has been widely used in cement, power, metallurgy, petrochemical and other industries.