ARMONIO – “Plug and Play” ARchitecture for a MONItoring Systems of the Portuguese Ocean José A. Fonseca (jaf@det.ua.pt), Paulo Bartolomeu, Osvaldo Pacheco, António Macedo, Pedro Duarte Deptº de Electrónica e Telecomunicações – Universidade de Aveiro IEETA – Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro Abstract This paper describes an implementation of a distributed architecture for environmental monitoring systems used for hydrographic and meteorological applications. The architecture is based in the producer-consumer model and uses wireless communications and commercial telecommunications to simplify the set-up, operation and maintenance procedures. The Bluetooth standard was found adequate to be used at the so-called local monitoring systems (LMSs) which are the units that gather information in the field. The architecture of these LMSs is presented in the paper. An overview of the connection of the LMSs to the final users is also discussed. 1. Introduction Environmental monitoring systems used in some specific applications can often become cumbersome in what concerns assembly, installation exploitation and maintenance. This is particularly true when dealing with systems that must cover a large geographic area, requiring often sub-systems located in remote regions, in places with difficult access and in sites with complex installation. The case of monitoring the ocean margins is one of the examples and is, in fact, the application that led to the research carried on in the ARMONIO project 1 . Some of the authors have felt the problem of managing the complexity of environmental monitoring systems in a previous project [1] in which sea water quality monitoring was done. The interconnection of units, some of them under water, the installation in places subject to tide levels changing more than 4 meters, were just some of the problems encountered. Another project [2], in which other of the authors was involved, would benefit from an improvement in the architecture. This project has brought also to the ARMONIO project experience in the development of systems for control and monitoring of environmental variables. This system, called SIMOQUA and used by the Aveiro water company to monitor the production of water for domestic use, integrates applications developed for data analysis, for extracting data and information reduction. These are built on the top of a SCADA system, supported by a common database. The developed SCADA model, allows to integrate in the same platform the quality control and the remote management of the devices. 1 The ARMONIO Project is funded by Fundação das Universidades Portuguesas and the Portuguese Ministry of Defence under the Program “Ocean and its Margins” Commercial products such as the ones that can be found in [9], [10], [11] keep the traditional architectures, using interconnection solutions such as telephone, cellular telephone, radio links, satellite telephone to build SCADA systems that don’t show a common integrated architecture. Global Country Coverage Any Where Installation Scalable Accessible from any location Figure 1-Geographical Area Coverage In the case of the monitoring system studied in the ARMONIO project, there must be a set of local monitoring subsystems (LMSs, represented by the round shapes in figure 1) which collect several physical parameters of interest for hydrographic, meteorological and, in the future, military applications. Examples of such parameters are: water temperature, tide