Internet-based Control Systems

The Internet plays a significant and growing role in real-time industrial manufacturing, scheduling and management. A considerable research effort has led to the development of new technologies that make it possible to use the Internet for supervision and control of industrial processes. Internet-based Control Systems addresses the challenges that need to be overcome before the Internet can be beneficially used not only for remote control and monitoring of industrial plants but also of domestic appliances and in medicine and education. New design issues such as requirement specification, architecture selection and user-interface design are dealt with. Irregular data transmission and data loss and, in extreme cases, whole-system instability may result from Internet time-delay; this book guards against such phenomena. Security breaches in an Internet-based control system could have very serious consequences and the author gives specific advice for avoiding them. Practical perspectives are explored both through case studies in several chapters and through real applications including: • virtual supervision parameter control of a water tank system; • model predictive control for a process control unit • remote integration of real-time software; • robot arm control; • simulator for a catalytic reactor; and • monitoring and control of a home environment. Internet-based Control Systems is a useful introduction and guide for researchers in control engineering and information technology and developers of real-time-Internet-enabling software. It can also be used for teaching a final year option or elective on Internet-enabled system design, or as an advanced example of real-time software design for graduates.