Remote troubleshooting and monitoring to process control systems by Internet

In Austria, some companies have exported a lot of complete sets of equipment abroad, including Asia and North America. They are composed of the local network system to implement the process controls. Once there are any troubles in the systems, the companies have to dispatch specialists or technicians to the fields. Because they are very long distances, this takes a lot of time, manpower and finance. In recent years, network communications technology has been rapidly popularized and commercialized. This fact provides us a good means to realize remote troubleshooting and monitoring to the process control systems. This paper proposes a remote troubleshooting method by means of the Internet. The basic ideas are: (1) recording the relevant process data of the control system in the local network as the historic database; (2) a field server as the front end of the database; (3) a proxy server mediating between the dial-in line and the Internet for network communication; (4) a client through the proxy server to access to field servers. Through the above-mentioned system layout, a specialist may retrieve the process information from the remote fields. He may analyze the data through various diagnostic programs, to find out the cause of the problem. Then he can send the results to the field technicians to fix the problem. Moreover, it is also possible that man may have the remote monitoring to the process control systems, to timely understand the production condition and the devices status.