WAMDAS: A Web service-based wireless alarm monitoring and data acquisition system for pharmaceutical plants

Typical IT infrastructures used in manufacturing companies such as pharmaceutical plants are based on enterprise servers, with vast capacities for large data sets, managed with relational database systems, with powerful capabilities for query processing. In addition, workstations running diagnostics and control applications that monitor critical status conditions in manufacturing equipments are located in far locations throughout the plant. These workstations are wired to sensors that gather information from the equipments. This organization makes it difficult and expensive to integrate these systems efficiently in order to monitor status and alarm information from equipments. To mitigate this problem, we have developed the Wireless Alarm Monitoring and Data Acquisition System (WAMDAS), a Web Service-based wireless system to monitor status of equipments, and process critical alarms triggered by contingencies that occur during operational conditions. WAMDAS integrates data sources residing in workstations and enterprise servers with their traditional DBMS always running. These data sources contain status information and alarms generated from plant's equipments. In our work, we show that our system is scalable, efficient and capable of managing the typical number of status requests, alarms and acknowledgment messages per hour that can occur at a pharmaceutical plant.