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
monitoring of but also remote control industrial plants. 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 from
both computer science and control engineering perspectives. Security
breaches and safety risks in an Internet-based control system could have
very serious consequences and the author gives specific advice for
avoiding them. This book is unique in bringing together multiple strands
of research, mainly from computer science and control engineering, into
an over-arching study of the entire subject.
Practical perspectives are explored both through case studies in several
chapters and through real applications including:
- robot arm control;
- web-based simulator for a catalytic reactor;
- virtual supervision parameter control of a water tank system;
- model predictive control for a process control unit;
- remote control performance monitoring and maintenance;
- remote control system design and implementation;
Internet-based Control Systems is a useful introduction and guide for
researchers in control engineering and computer science and developers
of real-time Internet-enabling software. It can also be used for
teaching a final year option or elective on Internet-enabled real-time
system design, or as an advanced example of real-time software design
for graduates.
