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 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;

·         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.

Shuang-Hua Yang is Professor of Networks and Control in the Department of Computer Science at Loughborough University, with experience of leading and working within TSB, EPSRC, Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, British Council, MoD, and industry funded research projects. He is a networking and control specialist and the author of over 180 research papers, currently focusing on wireless sensor networks, RFID, wireless communication, remote monitoring and control research. His group researches aspects of networking and control and addresses specific issues related to wired/wireless networks and networked control, and application performance investigation. The work ranges from underlying mathematical theory to the practical creation and operation of wired/wireless intelligent networked systems. Professor Yang was one of the first investigators in the UK funded by EPSRC for carrying out research on networked control and has numerous publications in the area. Future work will be supported by a recently awarded military service related research contract.