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The process control system (PCS) acts as the central control and monitoring unit in the company. Various processes and systems throughout the company or in a specific plant are monitored and controlled from here. To ensure a clear control room, it is therefore advantageous if a separate monitoring solution is not required for each system or monitoring. Althen's condition monitoring system offers a flexible solution here, as it can be seamlessly integrated into various external or third-party systems.

Althen uses the extensive possibilities of MQTT/MQTTs and HTTPS protocols, which offer a smooth connection to process control systems from various manufacturers such as Siemens, Yokogawa, Emerson and ABB.


About the communication protocols

MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) is an open protocol developed for the transmission of messages between devices in a network. It was specially designed for communication in environments with limited bandwidth and/or unstable network connections.

MQTTs is a variant of MQTT that offers security through the use of TLS/SSL (Transport Layer Security/Secure Sockets Layer) for the encryption of communication. This protects the transmitted data from unauthorized access. In this way, MQTT and MQTTs enable reliable and secure communication between different devices and systems in a network. The MQTT client establishes a connection with the MQTT server and can then either publish messages, subscribe to specific messages or do both at the same time. As soon as the MQTT/MQTTs server receives a message, it forwards it to the relevant subscribers.



HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure version of the HTTP protocol used for transferring data on the Internet. This is the process by which data is sent from a client to a server via HTTP requests and returned to the client by the server via HTTP responses. The data is protected by encryption. It is also possible to carry out configurations remotely. In general, the manufacturers of process control systems support these protocols. Alternatively, Althen offers the use of its own cloud solution "Althen IoT Monitor".