Offloading industrial human-machine interaction tasks to mobile devices and the cloud

This paper presents a three-tier architecture to offload Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) industrial automation tasks to local mobile devices and then the cloud, to take advantage of distributed computing and processing resources and to add new features to the HMI panel system. To best utilize the merits of each tier, a scheduling algorithm intelligently distributes the HMI tasks among the local HMI panel, mobile devices, and the cloud while taking into consideration their real-time characteristics. We demonstrate the proposed architecture with a real implementation on with a turbine control HMI.