A FUNCTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE WEB-BASED DISTRIBUTED CONTROL SYSTEMS

Abstract

According to the prosperity of Internet technologies, users can not only get the information from remote control systems but also give control commands to the remote control systems via the Internet anywhere anytime. However, traditional distributed control systems in which the standard middleware such as CORBA or DCOM is used have the several problems: the compatibility between CORBA and DCOM, the reachability over the security barrier, and the portability to the embedded control systems. In this paper, the drawbacks of the traditional CORBA-based distributed control systems are discussed first. Then a functional framework for the web-based distributed control systems is proposed where SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) represented by XML(eXtensible Markup Language) is used for flexibility and portability. Also a distributed control system is implemented as an experiment to show that the proposed framework is more flexible and scalable than the existing distributed systems with the standard RMI protocols such as CORBA or DCOM.