WEBHMI

Project abstract

WebHMI aims at promoting some research activities in the field of Human Machine Interaction (HMI) by means of a collaboration between ESA Elettronica SpA and the Politecnico di Milano. ESA is a leader company in the field of HMI for industrial plants and environments. The project comprises analysis, design, and prototyping of a new generation of HMI devices.
Such devices shall be applied to the fields of industrial automation, building automation, home automation (domotics), and in general to device control by means of user interaction. The introduced innovation consists of an extension of the current technologies for human machine interface implementation.
New features shall be covered, such as: personalization, multi-device enablement, adaptivity, accessibility from etherogeneous networks (both wired and mobile). The new architecture allows HMI systems to leverage the benefits of the Web architectures, by implementing standard protocols and architectures, based on well-established technologies. This moves the HMI environment toward the current market requests, that include support of TCP/IP networks, dynamic Web applications and Web services, multi-tier architectures, and markup languages for standard internet browsers.
The project has an overall duration of 3 years and started in December 2005.

Project results

The aim of the project consists in transferring the advantages of Web technologies and standards to the HMI environment, thus radically innovating the products of this field. Expected results include:

• Study of the HMI competitive environment.
• Study of the technologies possibly useful for the innovation of the HMI field.
• Analysis, high-level design, and detailed design of a client-server architecture based on Internet technologies and standards for the publishing of HMI applications on low-power devices.
• Analysis, design, and implementation of a case-study of building automation oriented to the management and protection of culutural heritage. In particular, the application will manage some museum branches of Musei di Como.
• Client-side architecture leverages vector graphics technologies for the Web (Macromedia Flash, SVG, and so on), that are able to work on standard web browsers and plugins. Thanks to this features, the application will be accessible from any kind of PC, PDA, SmartPhones, industrial touchscreens, and so on.
• At server side, the project envisions the usage of light Web servers, to be installed on embedded systems (like the ones produced by ESA), and standard storage technologies such as XML, relational databases, and text files (possibly remote).
• The final applications can be completely personalized by means of a compile-time configurator software.

The added value of this project consists of the revision of the software architecture of the current product portfolio of ESA Elettronica. The envisioned innovation allows to move from the current monolithic ESA architecture (based on proprietary operating systems, software, and protocols) to standard protocols and architectures, based on well-established technologies, such as TCP/IP, Web applications, and Web services. The overall flexibility and interoperability of the system shall be dramatically increased.