Integrating Web-Based User Interface Within Cern's Industrial Control System Infrastructure

For decades the user interfaces of industrial control systems have been primarily based on native clients. However, the current IT trend is to have everything on the web. This can indeed bring some advantages such as easy deployment of applications, extending HMIs with turnkey web technologies, and apply to supervision interfaces the interaction model used on the web. However, this also brings its share of challenges: security management, ability to spread the load and scale out to many web clients, etc… In this paper, the architecture of the system that was devised at CERN to decouple the production WINCC-OA based supervision systems from the web frontend and the associated security implications are presented together with the transition strategy from legacy panels to full web pages using a stepwise replacement of widgets (e.g. visualization widgets) by their JavaScript counterpart. This evolution results in the on-going deployment of web-based supervision interfaces proposed to the operators as an alternative for comparison purposes.