Remote control service system architecture and dynamic web user interface generation

According to current development of internet technology, remote control over the internet becomes a heated discussed topic. Some recent technologies such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), web service and ontology offer great opportunity for remote control over the internet and a lot of research has been done into this topic. However, there are still many challenges in architecture design and dynamic user interface generation. Architectures in this research field lack clear description of controlled machine model as well as related knowledge support. Also, there is little system support further control service development. There is little research on web user interface design for remote control system over the internet. The design of web user interface has the challenge of overcoming the limitations of web technology to satisfactorily support different machines, users and control process requirements. This work overcomes the limitations on architecture by offering a SOA based design which allows both multiple users and distributed machine access. The system applies a machine model for the description of the machine structure and functions, which help the system to reason about machine components and their relationships with instructions. With a web service based design, different machines can be connected via the system and execute user commands. Using semantic description and ontology based methods the system can automatically retrieve machine information and generate the structure and function descriptions for different machines. Moreover, the system provides services which can support further development in remote control services. The proposed architecture improves on former designs, and offers a flexible architecture for remote control services over the internet. An intelligent web user interface is also introduced in this work. The design separates the interface data structure from the data representation. Supported by the remote control service development environment, the user interface could adapt to the control sessions. Semantic descriptions are used to describe the page data structure, session context as well as control command. Therefore, control page content can be adapted by the computer to real time control session. At the same time, a session dependent navigation is designed to resolve the problem of changeable requirements for multiple-machine web user interface. With a message driven model and a session dependent semantic data structure, the required machine data can be analysed by the system and categorised according to user s requirements. Compare with other designs, this service offers a method for web user interface generation for different machines, users and can adapt to different control processes. The design is demonstrated in five evaluation scenarios aimed at testing different aspects of the system. Evaluation demonstrates the design proposed in this thesis is feasible. It also shows the design can be applied to different areas and adapted to different control related requirements well