Proposal and evaluation of a method of remote access to FA controllers via the internet

In this paper, we propose a method of implementation of a remote access system to controllers in a manufacturing line via the Internet. In order to reduce development cost, we adopt the method of not modifying user interface-related programs in existing controller access software, but modifying communication processing programs in it. We designed three types of implementation methods according to the communication protocol translation between the controller access communication protocols and TCP/IP. From the qualitative analysis of these three methods, we determined that the TCP/IP data wrapping method is the best among the three implementations. This paper also describes our prototype implementation of a remote access system based on TCP/IP data wrapping method and evaluates the results of our proposed method. © 2002 Scripta Technica, Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 85(6): 23–32, 2002