Enterprise-wide SCADA

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Thread Starter

David Gillies

A client of mine is doing an enterprise-wide SCADA implementation. They have SCADA in their environment, but not enterprise-wide.

There are plenty of folks out there who know "SCADA" but what skill set is going to be critical in deploying this type of system enterprise wide? Obviously, project management, but beyond that, what do they look for in an individual who might be able to perform this for them? Obviously, it is mission-critical and cannot go wrong.

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

- David
 
In addition to the points you have already mentioned the candidate will need a good understanding of:

1) the manufacturing processes being controlled.

2) networking and communications.

The first is required so that he will know how a system will fit into the customer's real needs.

The second is required so that he will understand how all these systems can be fitted together (the "enterprise-wide" aspect). I don't mean that he needs to know how to program a Cisco switch, but he does need to know the difference between a switch and a router and the difference between a LAN and a WAN. The scale of the communications is the difference between a small local system and an "enterprise-wide" system.

In addition to the above, he needs to have good communications and writing skills. He is going to have to deal with a lot of stakeholders, most of whom will have only vague and conflicting ideas of what they want.
 
A enterprise-wide or world-wide SCADA implementation would work like web-browsers and web-servers. That is you would have one universal client (browser) on each desktop and a lot of distributed servers all over the plant.

Using hyperlinks you could surf the whole plant.

This is exactly what our http://pvbrowser.org does.

PS: In principle you could do that with Ajax-based web technology. But this would not be very dynamic because the web has not been invented with SCADA in mind. Our pvbrowser works with dynamic Qt widgets instead of almost static HTML and achieves high update rates that are not possible with HTML.
 
Fleet wide operations are more complex than controlling a single production plant. I am also doing something like... My experience says 2 things:

1. Try using Asyn communications.

2. Try not using web applications if users are limited.
 
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