Web-based remote monitoring and control for process plants

There is a great deal of benefits for process plants to adopt the Internet to control systems. This contribution develops the systematic design methods for the design of remote monitoring and control over the Internet. In this paper, five essential design issues that arise from Web-related features of Internet-based remote control have been investigated: communication latency, network communication architecture, optimal control structure, Web-based user interface, and security aspects. Uniquely, novel network communication architecture and optimal control structure with time-delay compensator are implemented to deal with dynamic delays caused by the Internet traffic. A water tank control systems is used to demonstrate our design objective. The experimental results show that remote control systems over the Internet for the water tank can achieve ideal dynamic performance even in the presence of some Internet traffic delay if properly designed.