Minimalist Architecture to Generate Embedded System Web User Interfaces

This paper presents a new architecture to semi-automatically generate Web user interfaces for Embedded Systems designed using IOPT Petri Net models. The user interfaces can be used to remotely control, monitor and debug embedded systems using a standard Web Browser. The proposed architecture takes advantage of the distributed nature of the Internet to store all static user interface data and software on third-party Web services (the Cloud), and execute the user-interface code on the user’s Web Browser. A simplified protocol is proposed to enable remote control, status-monitoring, debugging and step-by-step execution, minimizing resource consumption on the physical embedded devices, including processing load, memory and communication bandwidth. As the user interface data and code are kept on third-party Web services, these resources can be shared among multiple embedded device units, and the hardware requirements to implement the devices can be simplified, leading to reduced cost solutions. To prevent down-time due to network problems or server failures, a fault-tolerant topology is suggested. The distributed architecture is transparent to end-users, observing just a Web interface for an embedded device on the other side of an Internet URL.