Virtual Plant: a distributed environment for distance monitoring and control of industrial plants

This paper proposes a Virtual Plant to access through the Internet (or Intranet) a remote industrial plant and interact with it from a distance. The aim is remote performance of the normal monitoring and control operations that are usually carried out locally, so that the technicians who evaluate the trend of the production cycle, or diagnose and possibly resolve any malfunctions that occur, do not necessarily have to be physically present in the plant itself but can operate from any part of the world through the Internet. This makes intervention not only timely but also efficient (it is possible to centralize logically correlated functions even when they refer to remote elements) and safe for the staff involved as they do not always have to be physically present in risky environments