SCADA systems are widely used in industry for supervisory, control and data acquisition of industrial processes. These systems allow operators to act on the underlying processes by means of very rich and interactive graphical user interfaces accessible at a central facility.
The trends in industry has been to integrate these kind of systems with other corporate IT functions, focusing both on reducing maintenance costs and on achieving powerful systems which may also be accessed for people outside of the control room.
Taking SCADA to the Web is a way to provide more people with wider access to SCADA information, by means of a common and ubiquitous element: the Web Browser. However, the complexity of SCADA interfaces may present some challenges when trying to develop SCADA Web based applications, due to the browser's natural disability in providing a rich and interactive user experience.
In this work, we propose a strategy to provide SCADA Web based interfaces through a set of Java custom graphical components, which can be integrated into applets that run inside a browser. The work consisted in the definition of a collaborating components architecture, based on the publish/subscribe paradigm for the exchange of information. The arquitecture was implemented as a component framework. In addition, a SCADA specific tools library was developed in order to contribute for the rapid implementation of graphical custom components. The core element of the library is a custom component used for displaying synoptic diagrams for the SCADA system.
An evaluation of this work was performed, which concluded that the strategy, as initially proposed, fulfills its purposes. It also proved the usefulness of the tools that were developed.