Web-based monitoring and control of a lab-scaled water distribution system

Abstract

In Malaysia, Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) has been widely used in process industries, particularly for process system automation. To increase the efficiency of the process, implementation of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system is favorable. However, in Malaysia, for some small medium (SME) industries, SCADA has been considered as pricey and an uneconomical option. Therefore, in this paper, an open source and low-cost SCADA system design is developed and implemented on a lab-scaled water distribution system (WDS). The proposed system involved manipulating two flow rate sensors to achieve desirable water level of the reservoir tank, hence the water volume, controlled by OMRON PLC CPIH. The ThingsBoard IoT server utilized for data remote monitoring and controlling purposes, is in a local computer and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is implemented for data transfer over serial communication via Node-RED. Through the implementation of the proposed system, the lab scaled WDS is successfully monitored and controlled remotely through the web-based application.