Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is an industrial control system which is used in many modern industries like energy, manufacturing, power, water transportation, etc. In power system, SCADA is used in all spheres system operations starting from generation, to transmission, to distribution, and to utilization of electricity.
The basic SCADA functions include data acquisition, remote control, human-machine interface, historical data analysis, and report writing, which are common to generation, transmission, and distribution systems.
SCADA is an integrated technology composed of the following four major parts: MDMS, Communication System, RTU, Field Equipment.
Communication System: This refers to the communication channels employed between the field equipment and the master station. The bandwidth of the channel limits the speed of communication.
MDMS: This is a collection of computers, peripherals, and appropriate input and output (I/O) systems that enable the operators to monitor the state of the power system (or a process) and control it.
Remote terminal unit (RTU): It’s like eyes, ears and hands in human body. It collects signal from field, then processes and sends to MDMS. MDMS send control signals to hands to act. Nowadays Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) has been taken the place of RTU.
Communication among devices is key to successful SCADA implementation in modern power systems. Traditionally most vendors in the automation scenario established their own unique ("proprietary") way to communicate between devices. Getting two vendors' proprietary devices to communicate properly is a complex and expensive task. The possible solution to the problem is through two basic approaches:
Buy everything from one vendor.
Get vendors to agree on a standard communication interface.
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