Assignment 3

Mujeeb Hassan (1609-B EE-012)

SCADA:

Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) is a system of software and hardware
elements that allows industrial organizations to:

 Control industrial processes locally or at remote locations

 Monitor, gather, and process real-time data
 Directly interact with devices such as sensors, valves, pumps, motors, and more through
human-machine interface (HMI) software
 Record events into a log file

SCADA systems are crucial for industrial organizations since they help to maintain efficiency,
process data for smarter decisions, and communicate system issues to help mitigate downtime.

It is used in industries such as energy, oil and gas, water, power, and many more. The system has
a centralized system that monitors and controls entire sites, ranging from an industrial plant to a
complex of plants across the country. A SCADA system works by operating with signals that
communicate via channels to provide the user with remote controls of any equipment in a given
system. It also implements a distributed database, or tag database, that contains tags or points
throughout the plant. These points represent a single input or output value that is monitored or
controlled by the SCADA system in the centralized control room. The points are stored in the
distributed database as value-timestamp pairs. It's very common to set up the SCADA systems to
also acquire metadata, such as programmable logic controller (PLC) register paths and alarm
statistics.

INDUSTRIAL PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF SCADA:

SCADA systems are used for monitoring a variety of data like flows, currents, voltages,
pressures, temperatures, water levels, and etc., in various industries. If the system detects any
abnormal conditions from any monitoring data, then the alarms at the central or remote sites will
be triggered for alerting the operators through HMI.
There are numerous applications of SCADA systems, but a few most frequently used SCADA
applications include:

1. Manufacturing Industries
2. Waste Water Treatment and Distribution Plants
3. SCADA in Power System

4. Improve quality control in food production.

5. Control utilities operations.

1. SCADA In Manufacturing Industries:

In manufacturing industries the regular processes like running the production systems to meet the
productivity targets, checking the number of units produced and counting the completed stages
of operations along with temperatures at various stages of the manufacturing process, and so on,
are taken care by using the SCADA application.

2. SCADA Application in Waste Water Treatment and Distribution Plants:

Wastewater treatment plants are of different types such as surface-water treatment and a well
water treatment system in which many control systems and automation processes are involved in
water treatment and distribution systems. SCADA systems are used for controlling the automatic
operations of the equipment used like backwashing the filters based on the hours of working or
amount of water flow through the filters.
 Waste Water Treatment and Distribution Plants

In distribution plants the water tank levels, pressure of system, temperature of plant,
sedimentation, filtration, chemical treatment and other parameters or processes are controlled
using the SCADA applications such as PLCs, PC based workstations which are connected each
other using Local Area Network (LAN) such as Ethernet.

3. SCADA in Power System:

Power system can be defined as constituent of power generation, transmission and distribution.
All these sectors are needed to be monitored regularly for improving the system efficiency. Thus,
the application of SCADA in power system improves the overall efficiency of the system by
providing the supervision and control over the generation, transmission and distribution systems.
SCADA in the power system network increases the system’s reliability and stability for
integrated grid operation.

SCADA in Power System

4. Improve quality control in food production:

Very similar to manufacturing, food production is a major SCADA application. If temp is
important for making gear, it is vital for the mass production of foods. If temperature varies more
than a few degrees, entire batches could be bad. This generates a lot of wasteful expense, which
makes deployment of a SCADA system absolutely vital. The movement of liquid and solid
ingredients through the process is also tracked by SCADA.

5. Control utilities operations:

Utility companies, mainly gas utilities, suffer the combined headaches of manufacturing and
telecom companies. They have to move a physical product through their systems, and they are
spread out across big areas. This makes SCADA devices a good fit in utility environments. They
need to control the movement of power and gas through the distribution chain. They must also
keep the supporting telecom infrastructure online.