Monitoring and Control Using Mobile Devices

Examples of Applications

Asix Mobile applications may be used in many ways. Here are some of the scenarios of use.

REMOTE CONTROL IN LARGE PLANTS

Asix Mobile allows for keeping control over large and distributed plants, such as wastewater treatment plants, water supply systems, heat distribution network, oil and gas transfer network, wind and solar power plants, traffic lights, bus and tram networks. You can respond to events without travelling to selected network points, without leaving the office or during on-call time at home.

DEVICE CONTROL WITH NO CONTROL PANELS

Asix Mobile may serve as the primary tool for monitoring and control of equipment and machine operation
that do not have any other, graphical interface. With one tablet you can operate many such devices, reducing equipment costs.

INTELLIGENT BUILDING MANAGED WITH A SMARTPHONE

Asix Mobile enables comprehensive management of a building fitted with automation directly via smartphone. You can control the operation of electronic devices, as well as lighting, blinds, heating, air conditioning or alarm system. The scope of application ranges from small, single-family houses to apartment blocks, hotels, large production facilities or shopping centres.

MAINTENANCE AND PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT

In the production plant, access to reliable information about the processes and production and the ability to control the production in real-time becomes a necessity. Asix Mobile on a mobile device allows the production maintenance engineers being up to date – have instant information on the course of the process, emergency situations and faults, the need to take maintenance actions – remotely, from any location within the plant. Production managers can monitor the results of production, material consumption, KPIs, OEE, etc., when out of the office, at meetings, any time, on a regular basis.

Architecture

Asix Mobile is an integral part of Asix system. The base for mobile application is a stationary server of application designed in Asix technology. Asix Mobile options (except for the visual part design) are configured in the Asix application settings. Basically it comes down to setting the parameters of the module responsible for communication with Asix Mobile devices and configuration of user authorizations.

Asix Mobile applications do not require the use of IIS server; all communication is done with the internal server module Asix. The whole mobile application project is stored on Asix server, therefore no information is stored directly on a mobile device.

During communication between the server and Asix Mobile devices, large emphasis is put on limiting the amount of transmitted data. Changes of the values of current variables and alarms status are sent on an on-going basis. However, in the case of access to historical data, they are fully processed on the server side, and the minimum necessary amount of information is sent to the device.

Application Safety

The communication between the application server Asix and Asix Mobile mobile devices is done by using a https encrypted protocol. This allows for free data transfer on the Internet.

Using a secure encrypted HTTPS connection requires the SSL certificate to be configured. It is recommended to use a certificate purchased from an external supplier, but it is also possible to generate it using Asix Mobile. The latter requires however installation of a generated certificate on each
device that will be used for running the Asix Mobile client.

Asix Mobile also lets the user use an unencrypted transfer over HTTP. In order to protect data from unauthorized access it is recommended to use a VPN connection. In addition to protection on the data transmission level, Asix Mobile also applies protection through the approval of user authorizations. Each access to the Asix Mobile application requires the user to log in. Verification of the correctness of the login and authorizations is carried out on the Asix application server using its user database. The scope of possibilities of users accepted to work in Asix Mobile application depends on their authorizations:

• Edition of diagrams and options – allows the users to create their own diagrams, change existing diagrams, setting a starting diagram and default appearance of diagrams.
• Variable control – allows the users to control the process (modify the values of variables).
• Alarm confirmation – allows the users to confirm the alarms.