2016 International Conference on Internet of Things and Applications (IOTA)
Maharashtra Institute of Technology, Pune, India 22 Jan - 24 Jan, 2016
IOT Application for Real-time Monitor of PLC Data
using EPICS
Ramesh Joshi1, H M Jadav, Aniruddh Mali, and S V Kulkarni
Institute for Plasma Research
Gandhinagar, India
1
Email: rjoshi@ipr.res.in
Abstract— A recent huge interest in Machine to Machine
communication is known as the Internet Of Things (IOT), to
allow the possibility for autonomous devices to use Internet for
exchanging the data. The Internet and the World Wide Web have
caused a revolution in communication between the people. They
were born from the need to exchange scientific information
between instrumentation. Control System Studio (CSS) (Best
Operator Yet Operator Interface) BOY OPI is not only an
application but also a framework that can be extended with
widgets and data sources. The framework provided
implementations for all the common functionalities, such as XML
file reader and writer, PV connection handling, abstract widgets,
properties, OPI Runtime and OPI Editor. The framework can be
extended using the extension points provided by the framework.
Monitoring systems CSS are extremely important in
Experimental Physics and Industrial Control Systems (EPICS).
Most of them are based on client/server(C/S). This paper designs
and implements a web based real time programmable logic
controllers (PLC) data monitoring system on EPICS data. This
system is based on browser and server (B/S). Using
MODBUS/TCP communication data have been archived in
EPICS. Then all data is displayed in a real time chart in browser
(Internet Explorer or Firefox/Mozilla). The chart is refreshed
every regular interval and can be zoomed and adjusted. Also, it
provides data tips showing and full screen mode. Acquire of the
data would be handled by multi-data acquisition card which has
been hardwired communication with PLC using 24 VDC to 5
VDC and vice versa electronics circuit.
Keywords—EPICS; PLC; DAC; IOT; OPI; CSS; MODBUS
I. INTRODUCTION
The Internet of Things [1] is seen as the natural evolution
of Internet including not only the communication between
human but also with any kind of object. This paper is an
introduction to the Internet Of Things and control system
software design. An analysis of the convergence of this
domain and the Control System is presented at the end.
Nowadays, people can do many things in web browsers,
such as online meetings, trading, gaming, watching movies,
and more. The web browser is no longer a simple browser. It
became a convenient platform for various applications. Web
applications have many advantages over desktop applications:
1) Easy to access. All you need is a URL; 2) Easy to deploy
and maintain; 3) Accessible from anywhere at any time. Web
applications with desktop application characteristics are called
Rich Internet Application (RIA)[2]. Various technologies have
been invented for RIA, such as Flash, Java Applet and
Silverlight, but all these technologies require separate plugin
978-1-5090-0044-9/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
or client software installed on the user’s device and even
worse, they are not available on popular iOS devices such as
the iPhone and iPad. Fortunately, HTML5 emerged in recent
years as a standard that has been quickly adopted by all
mainstream web browser vendors and further HTML6.
HTML5 based web applications have maximum cross-browser
and cross-device compatibilities with the use of semantic web.
HTML5 includes a set of new APIs such as a canvas element,
WebSocket, Drag-and-Drop, WebGL, Web Worker, Web
Storage, Audio, Video, and more. Among which, the canvas
element and WebSocket are most important for control system
UI applications. There are several API’s have been developed
base on this concept. The canvas element allows for dynamic,
scriptable rendering of 2D shapes and bitmap images. This
makes it easy to dynamically draw control system UIs in a
web browser. For each update, clients initiated a new
connection. The server could not initiate an update and “push”
it to the client. A number of workarounds have been used to
circumvent this problem, such as polling and long polling.
Even using asynchronous communication using AJAX kind of
concept has been introduced.
ICRH DAC system has been conceptualized for
experimental activities in tokamak [3]. Fig. 1 shows the ICRH
system architecture for monitoring and control system using
PLC. Local CSS OPI is the communication medium between
PLC and web browser client. PLC communicates with local
CSS OPI using MODBUS[4] and WebOPI communicate with
the same using http interface. DAC requires 32 analog inputs,
32 digital inputs, 16 digital output and 16 analog output
channels for monitoring and control of the system.
Counter/Times are used for system synchronization. PLC
(Delta AH500) can monitor and control the digital and analog
channels coming from field I/O [5]. PLC supports MODBUS
protocol which acts as a communication medium between
PLC and Computer. MODBUS/TCP over Ethernet is used for
our application which is open standard application layer
protocol. Ethernet provides the physical medium for
communication and TCP/IP gets the data packets to the
destination node. EPICS[6] is used as an control system which
consist of EPICS process variable database and EPICS Input
Output Controller (IOC). CSS BOY OPI is eclipse based
graphical user interface development editor which can controls
and monitors the signals between master and slave devices
using MODBUS. Pymodbus[7] library has been used in order
to communicate between PLC and computer.
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Fig.1: Monitoring and control using PLC
Fig.2: System architecture
Fig.2 shows the overall communication system
architecture between PLC to local interface which finally
accessed using web browser. PLC monitor and control the
digital and analog channels of the field I/O. WebOPI runs on
Tomcat or other supported application servers which receive
data from EPICS channel access layer. Finally all data are
available on web browser. PLC cannot acquire values at the
rate of 1ms,so to acquire values Multi Data Acquisition card is
used. Acquire of the data would be handled by multi-data
acquisition card which has been hardwired communication
with PLC using 24 VDC to 5 VDC and vice versa electronics
circuit.
II. IOT AND CONTROL SYSTEMS
“All of the Internet has been built by human processed
data : web pages, blog, social network. The problem is, people
have limited time, attention and accuracy—all of which means
they are not very good at capturing data about things in the
real world” [1]. The primary reason of the existence of the
control system is to ensure the capture all of the important data
from a thousand of devices necessary to operate a big
scientific facility.
The field bus or secondary control system and the primary
control system traditionally form the architecture of the whole
control system. The controllers which are situated close to the
equipment represent the main elements of the field bus
allowing the control of passive devices. The operators and the
controllers are interconnected through the primary network.
Since the wave of industrial PLC, the distributive aspect of
control systems has improved a lot. Nowadays, field busses
are more heterogeneous. On the other hand the flood of
Internet hardware has often pushed the primary network to be
based on the common TCP/IP stack. Ethernet has dramatically
decreased the price of each connection by letting the field bus
managing the hard real time task. Channel access provides
data available on application itself with broadcasting
mechanism. Control system includes different power supplies
of each RF generator stages. Ethernet control is possible
because these devices include an embedded controller with a
PLC also with Ethernet capabilities. The communication
protocol with the control system is often achieved through a
TCP/IP socket in a plain text protocol like SPI, or with a
binary protocol issued from Internet like CORBA, eventually
with the same protocol as the main control system like EPICS.
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The latest generation design of software frameworks for
control systems used by scientific facilities is also an outcome
of the Internet revolution. These frameworks interconnect all
devices on the primary network with the client applications. In
fact, the primary control systems of scientific facilities are
primarily tailored for the Machine to Human communication
(monitoring sensors) representing mainly the data in a
SCADA, or for Human to Machine action (steering actuators).
But the development of virtual controllers with a primary
Machine to Machine communication is more and more
common. Actually, any application which only needs “soft
real time” can be developed in the primary control system. In
some control system frameworks, the controllers are fully
abstracted to represent only the functional object. For example
C++ follows the object oriented programming paradigm.
MODBUS communication has been used for PLC and PC
communication over Ethernet. For EPICS the term “Device” is
equivalent of Things, encapsulating state, command, attribute
value, unit, threshold. In conclusion, a Control system is an
IOT in a confined network using WebOPI and CSS.
A. IOT Applications
Today the Internet Of Things has become a reality in
several applications[8], among them :
x Smart Cities: waste management, urban planning and
environment [9].
x Health: Ageing population, continuous care,
emergency response [10].
x Commercial: smart product management
x Agriculture: Smart farm is using wireless sensor on
cattle to know when one is sick or pregnant [11].
x Energy and Environment: FRED [12] is a sensor
network to monitor the energy management of
countries and states all around the world. In the same
way, “Our Planetary Skin” [13] project is a sustainable
water management platform.
B. EPICS and IOT
x EPICS is designed to be used for integrating
heterogeneous systems.
x EPICS based gateways can be easily
programmed/configured to support various protocols
and connect to various Fieldbuses
x EPICS, being based on the regular TCP/IP based stack,
can integrate very well with the ERP and MES systems
and can also facilitate connectivity to cloud.
x EPICS has good soft real time characteristics
x EPICS being based on TCP/IP can run on Wired
Ethernet or Wireless (Wi-Fi). So it is in line with the
trend of Ethernet based protocols.
x EPICS provides the graphical programming facility
x It also provides the facility to download configuration,
such that program behavior can be changed at run time.
 x Application development framework is provided by
EPICS
x EPICS used channel Access and pVAccess(EPICS 4),
both of which are subscribe-publish kind of protocols
and both are suitable for device to device
communication
x EPICS real time database provides facility to program
edge devices such that they can take autonomous
decisions
x EPICS provides good visualization tools
x EPICS is ideal for event based systems and data centric
systems.
x EPICS can be adopted for IEC 61499 or other
conformance
x VPN can be integrated, encryption and authentication
needs be buiktinto.
x EPICS 4 supports pvAceess which has support for
SOA
x EPICS being based on standard TCP/IP stack, can be
easily integrated into semantic based solutions, which
will be required for autonomous products.
x The required drivers, device interfaces required for
common IoT devices, protocols need to be developed.
III. WEBOPI
To bring control system user interface to the Web, the ideal
way is to directly run existing desktop Operator Interfaces in
web browsers without extra effort. This is how exactly
WebOPI does. It seamlessly executes OPI files created by CSS
BOY in web browsers, without any modifications (see Fig.3).
However, it is not realistic to replace the GUI-based operator
interface (OPI) with a Web-based system using Ajax
technology because of interactive performance issue. It has
some widget differences in local and web interface which has
been shown in Fig. 3 that is comparison of desktop OPI version
and WebOPI. Therefore, as a next generation OPI over the web
using EPICS Channel Access (CA), we developed a client
system based on WebOPI, which uses Web-based systems.
Fig. 3: Comparison of same OPI running in CSS BOY and web
browser.
One of the advantages of an EPICS-based system is the
unified communication between the front-end controller and
client systems provided by the CA (Channel Access) protocol.
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Thus, even when various types of controllers were used as
control systems, all the client systems such as the OPI could be
developed on the basis of the CA protocol without hardware
dependencies. In general, a method that used the CA libraries
or display manager supported by EPICS collaboration, such as
CAJ/JCA, CA-Python, MEDM/EDM, and CSS, was adopted
for the development of the GUI in the EPICS based system.
WebOPI makes interactive response realizable and thus
compensates for the disadvantage that could not be eliminated
in traditional HTML. Thus far, various types of Web services
in EPICS-based systems have been implemented. However,
there were only implemented in Web-based systems, where a
quick response and monitoring are unnecessary such as in
archive viewers and electric-log systems. Data can be archived
in terms of seconds or half a second in the case of PLC
communication using Web. This is because it is difficult for a
Web-based OPI to realize a real-time response similar to native
applications such as EDM/MEDM/CSS, even if Ajax
technology is utilized. Since it becomes bidirectional
transmission between a server and clients has become possible,
the aforementioned problem is solved by WebOPI. In practice,
we confirmed sufficient interactive response in a 100 ms cycle
using WebOPI on the Web browser, and it had a performance
similar to that of native EPICS applications such as EDM.
CSS BOY is a modern graphical operator interface editor
and runtime [14]. It allows users to build control system GUIs
using drag and drop from over 50 widgets. It is further
programmable via python, Jython or JavaScript. It provides
extension points for extra data sources, custom widgets, and
scripting libraries. By reusing the OPI files created from CSS
BOY, WebOPI can immediately inherit the powerful runtime
functionality of CSS BOY and leverage the intuitive graphical
editing capabilities of the BOY OPI Editor. Furthermore,
WebOPI and CSS BOY are 90% single sourced using Eclipse
Remote Application Platform (RAP) technology [15]. This
allows continuous synchronized evolution of CSS BOY and
the WebOPI, which means newly added features of CSS BOY
are immediately available within WebOPI.
IV. WEBOPI ARCHITECTURE
WebOPI is built on Eclipse RAP , which provides the
capability of bringing Eclipse RCP to the web by reusing most
of the existing RCP code. It achieves this by replacing the
Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) layer of RCP with the
Remote Widget Toolkit (RWT) layer as shown in Fig.4. RWT
code resides on both the server and the client side.
Underneath, it uses HTTP as the communication protocol.
Fig. 4: RAP architecture.
On the server side, its Java code provides the same
interfaces as SWT, so existing SWT application code can also
run on RWT. On the client side, it utilizes the qooxdoo
JavaScript library for native widgets, and HTML5 canvas
elements for custom drawing. The client side code is is almost as important as the identification of each web page
responsible for the representation and event detection, while (URI). The term Web of Things is often used for the
the server side code is responsible for processing the possibility for machines to refer to each other. The Semantic
application logic. For example, when the user clicks a button Web[22] is one of the standard data formats proposed by the
in their web browser, the client code sends the click event to W3C to help machines access Internet knowledge.
the server. Then the server side will process the event and
reply back to the client with a result. Event has been V. TEST RESULTS AND VALIDATION
communicated using AJAX from client side. If there are ICRH DAC user interface screen has been shown in fig. 5
updates that the server should “push” to the client, it uses the for 2 kW and 20 kW stage high power supplies. In each stage
HTTP long polling mechanism as mentioned before. While of power supply there are four different parts include digital
RAP provides a convenient single-source programming status, analog monitoring in graph as well as values, digital
model, implementers need to be aware of key differences control and analog voltage setting from top to bottom. Lower
between desktop and web applications. For example, each part of the screen shows the PV values and timestamp. Log
desktop application has a single user, while web applications messages are displayed in log message part. This log messages
allow multiple concurrent users. This requires the server to are archived in text file format for past records as logbook for
manage one UI thread life cycle per user. The server needs to experimental use. Fig. 6 shows the WebOPI interface for the
verify if the user is still online, and properly dispose related locally developed CSS BOY OPI.
resources once the user closes the web session. This is
achieved by regularly checking for the long polling signal
from each client. This and other small differences between
SWT and RWT are handled via suitable Eclipse fragment or
extension mechanisms, while the bulk of the BOY code is
shared between the RCP and the RAP implementation.
The Internet of Things means literally to connect
everything. The issue to provide a huge amount of unique
identity(UID) of each object has been resolved recently by the
progressive move to IPv6 the protocol, given the possibility to
connect 3.4×10^38 devices but only for TCP/IP based
communication. Despite this, IOT doesn’t yet define a
standard protocol of transportation. Even the usual TCP/IP
competes with the lowest protocols as they have the advantage
to be less energy consuming. In the Application layer [16] no
standard has been taken but most of them are based on an
event system (MQTT[17], XMPP[18]...). The enormous
market potential doesn’t help, resulting often in industrial
companies pushing for their own technical ‘standard’ solution. Fig. 5: CSS BOY OPI for ICRH DAC
However, some consortiums such as M2M[19] (Eclipse
Foundation) or IOT-A[20] (EU) try to federate the standard
and the tools.
Smart Things means that more intelligence will be
embedded inside the device and one important key allowing
the IOT is the possibility to connect itself to the network.
Embedding the communication protocol inside the device
implies that the Control System has to rely more on the
primary network, letting the secondary to be more specialized
for issues that need dedicated hardware (e.g. fast processing
and timing of electronic signals). Gradually the specific COTS
used for scientific applications have started to include
protocols to communicate directly with the Control System.
These “CS plug and play” devices enhance their integration to
the CS by defining their standard interface in a bottom-up
way. The Open Hardware[21] movement can lead to open the
protocols with the same impact of Open Source on the current
Web. Fig. 6: WebOPI for ICRH DAC
Apart of the unanimous concept of Sensors and Actuators,
the IOT stakeholders propose often a very specific solution for One can call any OPI in web browser with specified path
their domains of application. In the control system area, some from Local computer. Http protocol provides interface with the
services are essential, such as the Archiving or the Alarm tomcat server on application layer. The interface between CA
system. The need to identify information itself from an object gateway has been provided for EPICS process variables and

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WebOPI deployed war files on Tomcat web server. First, we processed by low consumption devices. The contribution of
considered the following in order to protect the IPR networks the control system domain to IOT is uncertain. The lack of
from outside intrusion. In the case of accessing the IPR federation caused by few requirements to have machine to
network from the WAN, we can ensure the security of WebOPI machine communication between different facilities reduces
access by using VPN and authentication with SSL. the possibility of contribution to IOT. Maybe some initiative
Additionally, system operators have to completely understand from the large facilities like CERN with the Open Hardware
the user attempting to access the networks and access route Licence[24] can contribute to an evolution of the embedded
(Internet providers) before WebOPI control is allowed. For intelligence.
caPut, which provides instructions to each device or
component during system operation, system operators need to Overall, with the above considerations, EPICS could be a
know the action and behaviour perfectly. Using Pyepics major middleware used in new industrial automation and IoT
package CA gateway interface is implemented with ICRH systems. The following additional features make EPICS a very
DAC software. On the other hand, it would not matter if they competitive option for IoT.
did not understand some simple instructions in detail such as x EPICS is vendor neutral
caGet and caMonitor, which are used to monitor or obtain the
numerical values for the system parameters with alarm, x EPICS eco-system provides several such tools, which
handling. Thus, when using caPut, a policy is needed for are not provided by other middleware solutions
between the system operators in the control room and a x EPICS real time database is suitable for real time
maintainer exerting control remotely over the Web. The processing at the boundary/edge and EPICS support
following are proposed for this policy. central programming and configuration are very
1. The authenticate users and passwords using SSL on the suitable for emerging IoT requirements.
Web. After the authentication, it is possible to monitor or
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