Internet-based control systems: design and applications.

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.