Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition

Newton-Evans Research Company introduces its new summary of findings and observations of transmission and distribution monitoring and control systems used in many of the world’s key electric power utilities. This study includes findings from more than 200 North American power utilities and 50-plus international utilities from 41 countries.

This New Study of the Global Electrical Power Market Incorporates Findings from Every World Region and Provides Market Assessment and Outlook for Global Markets.

Highlights from some of the 18+ individual topics researched in the global study of mission critical, real-time electric utility operational systems include the following:

OUTAGE MANAGEMENT: Almost thirty percent of the international utilities surveyed this year have implemented a separate outage management system (OMS). About 25% of the group plans to implement OMS as a separate system from SCADA/EMS by 2007. The largest international utilities were more likely to have already implemented an OMS than were their smaller counterparts. European and Asia-Pacific regional utilities were more likely to have implemented an OMS than were counterparts in other world regions.

GENERATION MANAGEMENT: Generation management systems (GMS) are also experiencing an increased level of activity this year, at least among those vertically integrated domestic North American utilities serving more than one half million customers. Most others (75%) continue to rely on automatic generation control (AGC) applications resident on their distribution SCADA systems for linking to power plant-based control systems (DCS¦s) or related power supply resources. Internationally, only a handful of participating utilities indicated use of, or plans for, a separate GMS.

Source and more information: electricnet

Silchester Controls is using SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) software from Citect as part of a control and monitoring system for a revolutionary ‘Inter-seasonal Heat Transfer’ (IHT) system developed by London-based energy company ICAX.

IHT is currently undergoing evaluation trials by the Transport Research Laboratory for the Highways Agency on a service road at Toddington adjacent to the M1 motorway to determine its effectiveness in preventing ice and snow formation on roads.

“The pilot IHT project is a real showcase for the technology,” says Cevn Vibert of Silchester Controls. “To get the best from our control system, we had to ensure the highest levels of flexibility in terms of local and remote monitoring and reporting; and the highest levels of operating reliability. We’ve used CitectSCADA in many of our previous projects, and we know that the package can deliver all of these benefits.”

Source and more information: mcsolutions

Since 9/11, protecting SCADA and distributed control systems against cyber attacks has gained much higher priority, especially for mission-critical operations — and yet few solutions focus on the operations end of the business.

Verano, Inc. (Mansfield, MA) is one of the few. Since it bought the RTAP (Real-Time Application Platform) SCADA business from HP in 2000, Verano has been working on a security event-management solution. That effort involves Verano’s Industrial Defender product, designed for mission-critical settings like power plants and water treatment facilities, and now spreading to manufacturing.

“What Verano does is unique,” says Charles W. Newton, president of Newton-Evans Research Co., Inc. (Ellicott City, MD), and an analyst who studies SCADA usage. According to Newton, virtually no one else provides the combination of SCADA and cyber security products and services that Verano does or offers a product like Industrial Defender.

Verano’s Industrial Defender product protects control systems and networks in real time against an array of internal and external threats. Those threats include hackers, viruses, malicious insiders, and authorized outsiders like contractors or automation vendors that connect to the network as part of their work or support function and can inadvertently or deliberately cause malfunctions, change critical files, or obtain data they are not entitled to see. The software also can provide alerts regarding the addition of unauthorized systems or devices as well as information-sharing violations.

Source and more information: managingautomation

Petrochemical processing plants have historically used DCSs; however, in the past several years there has been an increasing tendency in the industry to install scada systems instead. To understand what is driving this trend we must first look at the difference between a DCS and scada system.

DCS (distributed control system) and scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems both emerged independently within the controls industry and by the early to mid 1970s they both had a strong following. DCS was a term coined by two major control vendors providing plant automation systems in the early 1970s while scada first appeared in print in 1973 as part of the Bonneville Power Administration Study into system automation started in the late 1960s. Although these systems have much in common, the goals of DCS and scada systems are quite different.

DCSs are process centric and have a direct connection to the data source. They are primarily focused on realtime states with past and present process variables the main focus. DCSs are most often directly connected to the hardware device I/O, and therefore require a very reliable network connection to equipment. As a process state driven system, a DCS is sequential in nature with alarms generated not when a point changes but when a process is run; trends primarily focused on data states past and present. In many instances DCSs are not at all aware of a change in state, but simply report the current realtime state at the instant the hardware is polled. In a DCS, events and alarms (both central concepts in scada) are secondary to process displays. Therefore, it is often necessary to set up alarms by hand on each point, and many DCSs have limited alarm filtering. Finally, DCSs are deployed only when the system has a very small geographical footprint, such as a factory or plant, due to the fact that they must have a continuous connection to the hardware.

Source and more information: instrumentation