Integration of internet and virtual instruments to develop an industrial SCADA

An Internet- and virtual-instrument-based Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system for industrial applications is developed in this paper. In this paper, general purpose Virtual Instruments (VIs), which is used to communicate with RS232, acquire measurements, transmit data to Internet and receive data from Internet etc., are developed first. Then, using these VIs as building blocks, the proposed Internet-based SCADA system can be developed efficiently. In order to study the performance of the Internet and the test results, two network performance VIs are also presented in this paper. Test results show that the proposed method is useful for industrial automation.