An open communication system for remote control and monitoring dedicated to industrials applications over TCP-IP applied to public networks

Abstract

During these last years the evolution of the fieldbus networks together with traditional computers networks have simplified and allowed the integration of the different communication systems within both the single cells of production and between production cells and other systems for business intelligence, supervision and control. Various communication technologies already adopted exist today for public and non-public networks as Internet and Intranet. Since the most of the industrial applications are time-critical, the requirements of communication systems for remote control are different from the common applications for computer networks used in Internet like Web, e-mail and file transfer. Moreover, together with the requirements for time-critical traffic, the requirements of cyber security must be considered when the remote control is built over public networks like Internet. The communication solution, outlined in this work is proposed as the called CyberOPC Project. It includes the study and the realization of a new open protocol for the remote control of industrial systems, which in our study case are machinery CNC, satisfying the time-critical and cyber security requirements. The described work, in synthesis, will arrange already famous methodologies and new approaches of the Computer Networks and Cyber Security in order to develop a new protocol of transport for data process with the following goals: (i) to minimize the delays of transmission for time-critical control data; (ii) to guarantee the security of the used communication channel; (iii) to guarantee integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted control data.