Scalable Web Broadcasting for Historical Industrial Control Data

With the wide-spread use of asynchronous web communication mechanisms like WebSockets and WebRTC, it has now become possible to distribute industrial controls data originated in field devices or SCADA software in a scalable and event-based manner to a large number of web clients in the form of rich interactive visualizations. There is however no simple, secure and performant way yet to query large amounts of aggregated historical data. This paper presents an implementation of a tool, able to make massive quantities of pre-indexed historical data stored in ElasticSearch available to a large amount of web-based consumers through asynchronous web protocols. It also presents a simple, Opensocial-based dashboard architecture, that allows users to configure and organize rich data visualizations (based on Highcharts Javascript libraries) and create navigation flows in a responsive mobile-friendly user interface. Such techniques are used at CERN to display interactive reports about the status of the LHC infrastructure (e.g. vacuum or cryogenics installations) and give access to fine-grained historical data stored in the LHC Logging database in a matter of seconds.