Optimization of WAMDAS: A Web Service-Based Wireless Alarm Monitoring and Data Acquisition System for Pharmaceutical Plants

Abstract

We present a novel infrastructure which allows the Web service-based wireless alarm monitoring and data acquisition system for pharmaceutical plants (WAMDAS) to be a more portable, reliable, secure and robust wireless Web service-based middleware system. This infrastructure provides a reliable alarm management mechanism that guarantees timely alarm delivery according with a defined configuration schema for alarms. Also it provides a functionality to help the availability of Web services to respond the requests on time. Likewise, a Windows-based application module is provided to permit system administrators to dynamically configure all system information and parameters, as well as define the configuration scheme for alarm management. Furthermore, the device application was improved with a strong security mechanism to access the system, a mechanism to control the system usage, and a redesign of the user interface. We conducted an evaluation of the alarm services protocol; this evaluation shows that the alarm delivery time was optimized, and the alarm delivery process is more reliable and fault tolerant when using message queues instead of TCP/IP sockets.