NERD -- No Effort Rapid Development: A Framework for Provisioning Mobile Cloud Industrial Control Applications

Industrial Control Systems (ICS), such as wastewater treatment systems, are frequently composed of hundreds of devices distributed over a large geographic area. While mobile applications have been used with good success in managing ICSs, traditional methods of distributing applications (e.g. app stores) are not well suited to the task of distributing ICS mobile applications, as the highly individualized and often proprietary individual components of ICSs have vastly different interfaces leading to a need to download hundreds of applications. We propose the No Effort Rapid Development (NERD) framework to address the challenges of in-field human-machine interface (HMI) discovery, provisioning, and co-evolution with related ICSs. Mobile cloud services offer the ability to simplify on-demand HMI distribution and operation of ICSs. NERD leverages existing ICS device-markers (e.g. QR-codes or RFID tags) for rapid cyber-physical discovery and provisioning of HMIs in the field. Device-markers have a very limited data capacity, and to achieve on-device storage of HMIs we propose using a compact data-driven domain specific language that emphasizes data sources and sinks between the HMI and ICS cloud based services. Our approach seamlessly links controls in the physical domain with specific resources in the digital domain, such as device-specific interfaces or ICS-wide control interfaces. We provide a quantitative evaluation of NERD and show how NERD can simplify the process of in-field discovery and provisioning of HMIs and related applications.