PHcenter: A Platform for Process Diagnosis and Control via Internet

The paper presents a platform, which offers to the possibilities to connect remotely via Internet to an industrial process in order to monitor, diagnose and control it remotely. In this way, several expensive resources like experts and powerful computers that simulate the complex processes from the customer site can be shared at distance through Internet in order to optimize the costs and to increase the stability and reliability of the process by reducing the time to intervention. This solution has the advantage of a great flexibility created by the use of complex models of the processes. Also it is free of dangerous events. The experts from the diagnosis center can extrapolate the data collected from the real process in order to estimate the behavior of the system and prevent the possible dangerous situations. In case of observing a potential danger the experts will contact the operators from the control room of the real process in order to inform about the potential dangers and take the appropriate actions. The paper presents the architecture of the diagnosis platform we proposed, its performances and the advantages related to the solutions currently used.