Are you applying these seven SCADA innovations?

SCADA Insights

• Interest and investment in SCADA systems has grown in the era of Industry 4.0
• While SCADA system upgrades offer end-users many clear benefits, barriers still exist to justifying and completing new implementations.
• A variety of SCADA innovations offer operators further benefits and improve user-experience.

From its inception, Industry 4.0 has emphasized the pursuit of system-wide efficiencies and data-based decision making. As such, it’s no surprise that interest and investment in supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems has grown in recent years as companies seek to adapt. SCADA systems can provide end-users with a variety of benefits, including:

• Holistic visibility:因为SCADA系统提供一个中央平台for monitoring and visualization of entire operations, they can help end-users understand how different components and processes interact with each other.

• Data integration and analysis:By aggregating data from numerous sources, SCADA can help operators identify system-wide trends, patterns and correlations.

• Adaptive and predictive control and maintenance:Advanced analytics as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can be applied to the large datasets SCADA systems provide in order to anticipate future system behavior. This enables proactive, rather than reactive adjustments to optimize performance and prevent production stoppages.

In an August 15Control Engineeringwebcast, “SCADA series: New SCADA features and functions,”Matt Ruth, president at Avanceon, and Nicholas Imfeld, operations manager at Avanceon, discussed current trends and innovations pertaining to SCADA technology. A preview of some of the information covered is provided below.

Matt Ruth, president at Avanceon, and Nicholas Imfeld, operations manager at Avanceon. Courtesy: Avanceon

SCADA trends

According to Ruth, there are several key drivers of SCADA system upgrades. While obsolescence remains the most obvious, operation and personnel limitations should not be neglected.

“It’s not just about the technology. Today, many manufacturing leaders are really frustrated that they can’t see what’s going on with their systems,” Ruth said. “They also have the issue that even while they have very many people in their organization, they over-rely on ‘that one guy’ who has been with the company a long time and knows the secret sauce to troubleshooting the existing system.”

Furthermore, as older employees retire and new employees are brought in, transferring legacy knowledge may be difficult.

Still, multiple barriers to upgrade exist, including difficulty establishing a return-on-investment justification and lack of downtime windows in which the upgrades can be conducted. In the full webcast, Ruth discusses these challenges, and how to overcome them.

SCADA innovation

During Imfeld’s segment of the webcast, he detailed seven innovative SCADA features and explained how end-users can benefit from each. The features discussed include:

1. 态势感知

2. Windows hierarchy and tiered navigation

3. Enhanced alarms

4. Historical data and trending

5. Standards and conventions

6. Distributed architecture and virtualization

7. Variety of access.

David Milleris content manager and webcast moderator,Control Engineering, CFE Media and Technology,dmiller@cfemedia.com.

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Keywords: SCADA, Webcast

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