A web PLC using distributed web servers for data

acquisition and control

Wed based PLC
Joby Antony

Basanta Mahato, Sachin Sharma, Gaurav Chitranshi

Cryogenic Control,
Inter University Accelerator Centre (IUAC),
New Delhi 110067, India
jobyiuac@gmail.com

ECE (Microelectronics and Embedded Technology),

Jaypee Institute of Information Technology University
(JIITU) Noida-201307, India
basanta.mahato@gmail.com

Abstract Advancement in technology is very well reflected

and supported by changes in measurement and control
instrumentation. To move to high-speed serial from Parallel bus
architectures has become prevalent and among these Ethernet is
the most preferred switched Serial bus, which is forward-looking
and backward-compatible. Great stride have been made in
promoting Ethernet use for industrial networks and factory
automation. The Web based distributed measurement and control
is slowly replacing parallel architectures due to its non-crate
architecture which reduces complexities of cooling, maintenance
etc. for slow speed field processing. A new kind of expandable,
distributed large I/O data acquisition system based on low cost
microcontroller based web server[1] boards has been investigated
and developed in this paper, whose hardware boards use 8-bit
RISC processor with Ethernet controller, and software platform
use AVR-GCC for firmware and Python for OS independent
man machine interface. This system can measure all kinds of
electrical and thermal parameters such as voltage, current,
thermocouple, RTD, and so on. The measured data can be
displayed on web pages at different geographical locations, and at
the same time can be transmitted through RJ-45 Ethernet
network to remote web based data acquisition and control (DAC)
monitoring system by using HTTP protocol. A central embedded
single board can act as a central CPU to communicate between
web servers automatically. The novelty of this proposed system is
a substitute of web PLC for industry application.
Keywords- Embedded Web server; RJ-45 Ethernet network, remote
I/O data, data acquisition and monitoring system (DAC, Dataacquisition, TCP/IP, AVR-GCC

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the advent of networked sensors and actuators and

distributed control algorithm, industrial automation is faced
with a new challenge. The changing world market
requirements and perspective also drives the need for new
approaches and models to the development of distributed
control applications. An advanced industrial automation
system is becoming increasingly sophisticated with multiple
levels of control and automation. Control software
development and integration is a major challenge for advanced
industrial automation system in improving efficiency and
reducing cost. Different development tools, modeling
abstractions and engineering skills are used at multi-level
industrial automation system applications in different stages
over a typical development project. Unfortunately, this process

to develop control, application often fails, especially since

ad-hoc software designs provide too little structure to help
the process. Control platforms emerge as an effort to reduce
the developers risk of such failures [2].
Despite years of activity, truly open control systems seem still
to be a promise of the future. Agreement on common
architecture and mechanisms is needed to raise distributed
control systems from exchanging raw data to the level of real
interoperability of off-the shelf components [3]. Future control
platforms and development toolkits should have new build-in
mechanisms, such as standardized control and communication
mechanisms.
Embedded Web based acquisition and control system can
adapt to the strict requirements of the data acquisition system,
such as the function, reliability, cost, size, power consumption,
and so on. In this paper, a new kind of remote I/O distributed
data acquisition system based on embedded Web server has
been investigated and developed, which can measure all kinds
of electrical and thermal parameters such as voltage, current,
thermocouple, RTD, and so on.[4] The measured data can be
displayed through web pages from the server, and at the same
time can be acquired at different geographical locations
through RJ-45 Ethernet network using python based MMI to
remote DAS or DCS monitoring system by using HTTP
protocol. The system has the dual redundant network and
global communication function, which can ensure the disturb
rejection capability and reliability of the communication
network. A central embedded single board can act as a central
CPU to communicate between web servers.

II.

ARCHITECTURE OF THE DATA ACQUISITION

SYSTEM

The whole system architecture of the distributed web

servers for data acquisition and control based on embedded
web server platform is shown in Figure 1. In the proposal of the
system, the remote I/O data acquisition modules are developed
as embedded web servers having static IP with port

978-1-4244-9224-4/11/$26.00 2011 IEEE

server mode. The Ethernet controller directly supports the

Ethernet service and RJ-45 communication. Hence the data
has been stored and controlled by some other PCs or network
via Ethernet.

Figure 1. Architecture of distributed web servers for data acquisition and

control system tructure of the whole system.

80, which can be widely used to diversified industries such

as electric power, petroleum, chemical, metallurgy, steel,
transportation and so on. This system is mainly used for the
concentrative acquisition and conversion of a variety of
electrical and thermal signals such as voltage, current, thermal
resistance, thermocouple in the production process. The
hardware boards which are built around microchip Ethernet
controller (ENC28J60), Tx/Rx, MAC and PHY in one small
chip,
and ATmega-328P processors through Ethernet
transformer, Magjack; RJ45 with integrated magnetics and
LEDs or Ethernet network communication interface by using
TCP/IP protocol. ENC28J60 is a small chip with 28 pins only
and has a SPI interface which is easy to use from any
microcontroller. The data in the embedded controller platform
is transmitted to the remote client centers by Ethernet after
further analyzed and processed. At the same time, these data
can be stored in the real time of the server. The system has the
dual redundant network and global communication function,
which can ensure the disturb rejection capability and reliability
of the communication network. The hardware platform of
proposed system is based on embedded web server, a smart
small TCP/IP stack by Tuxgraphics, Guido Socher [1], uses 8bit RISC processor with Ethernet controller. The MMI software
platform uses the Python which runs HTTP Client GETmethod on Ubuntu operating system. The system is based on
utilizing Embedded Web Servers (EWS) technology to design
a Web-based distributed web servers for data acquisition and
control (DAC).

III.

CONCEPT DESIGN FOR A WEB-BASED PLC

USING DISTRIBUTED WEB SERVERS

The implementation aspects of the hardware structure of the

web based PLC using distributed web servers for data
acquisition and control based on EWS is shown in Fig 2. The
distributed I/O data acquisition and control system based on
embedded web server has each acquisition and control device
equipped with 24-way acquisition/control channels for Analog
input, Digital input & output. Each I/O channel can select a
variety of electrical and non electrical signals like current,
voltage, resistance etc. The measured data are stored in
memory in which the memory is act as a data base during web

Figure 2. A hardware structure of the web based PLC using distributed web
servers for data acquisition and control

IV.

SOFTWARE DESIGN AND REALIZATION OF THE

SYSTEM

A. Python for control applications

Python is a high level object-oriented programming language
whose main features is that it is intrinsically very readable.
PyQt are a set of Python bindings for Qt- a cross-platform
application development framework that is used for creating
GUI programs. PyQt allows creating custom-designed,
Python-based GUI easily. Python runs on Windows,
Linux/Unix, Mac OS X.
The basic functions including task management, system
management, timer management, information management,
queue management and so on. These functions are used
though GUI service functions of the core.
The pseudo code for acquiring data from different I/Os are
given below. Data1, data2, data3, data.n represents every
I/O read return value which contains status of read.
Database1..n.html will contain the result data string.
mydatastations = [ 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3]
import httplib
conn1 = httplib.HTTPConnection("10.0.0.1")
conn1.request("GET", "/database1.html")
r1 = conn1.getresponse ()
print r1.status, r1.reason
data1 = r1.read ()
save data1 into MMI data base
conn2 = httplib.HTTPConnection("10.0.0.2")

conn2.request ("GET", "/database2.html")

r1 = conn2.getresponse()
print r1.status, r1.reason
data2 = r1.read()
save data2 into MMI data base
import httplib
conn3 = httplib.HTTPConnection("10.0.0.3")
conn3.request("GET", "/database3.html")
r1 = conn1.getresponse()
print r1.status, r1.reason
data3 = r1.read()
save data3 into MMI data base
A test GUI designed to test such a set-up in Python is given
below:

controlling. Moreover the Internet connection can be realized

using both Ethernet and also be realized by Wi-Fi data link
protocols [1]. Also embedded web servers guarantee a high
robustness in terms of boot time and they can work also
without any power supply (PoE) [1]. The prototype can be
easily extended to more devices or machines. The system is
demonstrated to be suitable for different embedded
applications by attaching several real-time modules through
appropriate interfaces.
Regarding the security issue, the prototype takes into account
only a cipher authentication. So, adding security to this system
is currently not in the scope of this work, presently it is for
network which is private and standalone. So, using the
screenshots coming from the developed application we will
show how it is possible to use the proposed data acquisition
system for a controlled channel. For that we have to reach the
embedded web server by typing its address into the web
browser (for example we tested the prototype in a LAN, where
the server has the 10.0.0.40 address) and each web clients
differ by the IP addresses. Figure 4, 5, and 6 are the snapshots
of HTML & JavaScript client to monitoring and control test
screen on a single client PC with alarm web page and also the
Installation system.

Figure 3. Pyplot data plot

A web server concept is useful to stream data through text

files through standard http clients. So designing an MMI can
have multiple options of language selection. Some of the
common options to explore web server PLC MMI are
LabVIEW, Python, Qt, PyQt, HTML & JavaScript.
V.

EXAMPLE OF IMPLEMENTING THE PROPOSED

SYSTEM FUNCTIONS

The proposed system have been tested and subsequently

implemented at IUAC, New Delhi, India. The anticipated
system has a lot of benefits. The usage of standard protocols
both for the acquisition network and for the distributed remote

Figure 4. A sample python control test screen data plot

With the rapid development of the field of industrial

process control and the wide range of applications of network,
intelligence, digital distributed control System, it is necessary
to make a higher demand of the data accuracy and reliability of
the control system. This embedded system can adapt to the
strict requirements of the data acquisition and control system
such as the function, reliability, cost, size, power consumption,
and remote access and so on. This system operated by
embedded Web server to acquire the signals and control the
devices remotely. Embedded web server mode is used to share
the data with clients in online. This concept can be widely
applied to write MMI using Lab VIEW, .NET etc. This system
is a substitute of web PLC for industry application run through
Embedded Web servers.
Figure 5. A Snapshot of Installation System

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors thank to IUAC, New Delhi, for the technical
support of the test and implementation of the proposed system.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]

Figure 6. A snapshort of HTML & JavaScript client to monitoring and

control test screen on a client PC

[3]
[4]

[5]

VI.

CONCLUSIONS

A web PLC using distributed web servers for data

acquisition and control based on embedded Web server is
designed in this paper. The system adopts Browser/Server
mode and control the remote systems. Therefore, remote users
can control and manage the operation using a Web browser
over the internet.

[6]

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TRANSACTIONS
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INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 51, NO. 3,
JUNE 2002
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