Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Approach in Node-RED: Application and Discussions

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents the binder of two worlds, specifically the real one and the digital one: tangible objects become recognizable in the virtual world, having digital matches, thus creating a network that enables the connection in-between the components. With the contemporary evolution of this domain, interconnectivity has become a primary fraction of new research and development directions. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a concept that covers the more industrial level of the physical and digital connection and stays behind the Industry 4.0 concept. Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) applications are important in the industry, their core being very present as complex products of big companies, at high prices. The Node-RED environment quickly evolved as one of the most important perspectives in IIoT, able to replace, up to a certain level, classic SCADA applications, bringing benefits to the industry. In this paper, the main focus is to evidence this aspect and to develop an application that will demonstrate the functionality of the concept, making use of protocols such as Modbus TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) for interacting with industrial devices and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) to interact with higher-levels, which provides a publish-subscribe structuring and a low band-width usage. The application uses logging and archiving modules based on InfluxDB database and is conceived to achieve the visual supervisory structure as close as possible to well-known SCADA solutions. The presented work results prove the efficiency of the solution.