A way towards efficiency of SCADA infrastructure

Abstract

Traditional SCADA solutions are currently under strong pressure by market, to shift their focus from process control of a limited set of industrial plants, to the control of a whole large-scale system. Usually this whole system is only partially covered by SCADA IO signals, therefore complex simulation model is required not only to give decision support, but also to replace all missing measurements. The whole control system has to be fully integrated, where SCADA infrastructure needs to hold and distribute all data, both SCADA and calculated. It leads to the extreme increase of real-time database, with millions of data points. It is a challenge that traditional SCADA designs, based on shared memory database and competing processes, cannot fulfill in real-time. The paper presents an alternative approach architecture and basic functionality of a SCADA system developed in line with this concept. It implements a SCADA server as a single executable with multiple threads, sharing data points stored in its own local memory. Threads provide parallel execution, while data integrity is achieved through careful data organization/segmentation, thread priorities and the use of thread-safe primitives for accessing data. It easily provides performances required by this type of applications. © 2012 IEEE.