Process data abstraction/accessibility via internet

The increasing use of internet in the automation field has brought new challenges in the remote control, supervision and management of industrial processes. Specifically, process data information has to be available anywhere/anytime on the internet. This brings together two main problems: process data abstraction and process data accessibility. In this paper, we present a specification for an environment aimed to virtually model industrial plants, for their remote control, supervision and management. In this environment, we model real industrial plants by means of communication objects called virtual industrial devices (VID). A VID is a software component, which may contain other VIDs and represents, with different degrees of abstraction, an entity of an industrial plant. These objects communicate and are accessible through a peer-to-peer industrial communication protocol that allows messaging interchange between virtual industrial devices (and graphic user interfaces) regardless the communication technology that supports the actual messaging.