The Basics of Hardware and Software for SCADA Systems

What are SCADA systems able to do?

As it is known, the SCADA systems are able  to measure and monitor
different parameters and variables , such as: the level of liquids, the volume
of the gases, the volumetric flow rate, the mass of liquids and gases, the
pressure, the temperature, the humidity, the viscosity, the position and the
moving, etc.

The Basics of Hardware and Software for SCADA Systems You Should Know
About

For this, some signals must be acquired based on the appropriate sensors
and transducers from different electrical and electronic devices, before to be
processed and analyzed by SCADA system. These data can be used for
supervision of remote processes.

For this, the data are processed and analyzed to generate reports which will
be transmitted to control the processes parameters within certain limits.

The SCADA applications have two basic levels:

1. The customer level, which will be performed the human-machine

interaction;
2. The data server level which will control the entire process.
Thus, the data server sends these data to the customer level via remote
equipment such as PLCs (connected to the database server either directly or
via a communications network, using various communication protocols).
The developed protocols can be property of a company (e.g. Siemens H1) or of
open type (Modbus, Profibus etc.). Database servers can be fully connected to
each other and also to the customer stations through  Local Area Network
(LAN) networks based on Ethernet technology.

The SCADA systems may be relatively simple or very complex, depending of

the dimension and complexity of the process monitored. These systems
operate in real-time using a database system named Real Time Data Base
(RTDB), which can be found on one of servers.

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Hardware Architectures

The servers are responsible for the acquisition and management of data for a
set of parameters. Is it possible to have dedicated servers for certain tasks (for
example, if the objective is to develop the process servers), servers dealing
with the handling of alarms, or file servers.

A SCADA server will be connected directly to the PLC via an  Open Platform
Communications (OPC)  or a RTU, which both collects and consolidates data
from and from PLC-uri (Figure 1). The SCADA takes on request the data from
indicator reading appliances and equipment condition.

The OPC and RTU work as a data concentrator. The data is structured using
a man-machine interface (HMI) in a convenient format for the operator in
order to be able to take any decisions that would optimize the communication
between the equipment.

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