Field gas supply station monitoring based on software-defined PLC edge server

Abstract

Traditional field gas station monitoring follows a pyramid control system scheme, and the system was divided into 4 layers: field, control, monitoring, and management. With the advance of technologies, two problems appear: 1). A variety of specialty controllers contribute to the control of a field gas station, each has its own HMI, the SCADA of the monitoring layer focuses on the integration of HMI functions, not on collection and analysis of big data. 2). To build an edge-cloud collaboration big data platform, data from all field gas stations are required, the traditional PLCs of the control layer and the SCADA system of the monitoring layer do not have enough computing power to collect and process data from all of the controllers. This paper proposed a software-defined PLC technology to integrate the control function of the control layer and the HMI function of the monitoring layer into an edge computing server with 5G support, that provide unified data acquisition, display, and data access functionalities on the premise, and support the required data collection for the cloud. This has been proven to be a consolidated and cost effective approach with improved customer values.