Design and Implementation of Remote Controlling and Monitoring System for Automatic PLC Based Packaging Industry

This paper presents an implementation of a human machine interface (HMI) for a programmable logic controller (PLC) based automated packaging process that can be remotely controlled and monitored using mobile application. A conveyor belt does the moving of products to a destined place for packaging, is controlled by Siemens LOGO! 230 RCE PLC. Microcontroller (arduino uno) operates the relays according to the output of IR sensors, which are used to sense the products. States of relays are taken as the input of the PLC. An HMI is designed with an android application and the microcontroller (as the processor) that establish a communication path between the operators and PLC based plant. The interface provides remote controlling and monitoring feature. The proposed design minimized the overall cost by replacing the widely used supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system with normal sensors and mobile application based control. The performance of the implemented prototype is evaluated through several real-time operations, which shows satisfactory results.