The many faces of SCADA

By Paul Miller

Today’s state-of-the-art SCADA is not your granddad’s supervisory control and data
acquisition system. It’s not even the one you may have cut your teeth on as a new
process engineer back in the day. The monolithic master station running proprietary
supervisory applications is long gone. So is communication via inflexible, single-purpose,
analog remote terminal units (RTUs) over often-tenuous, low-bandwidth radio or
telephone system-based links.

Over time, commercial-grade personal computers (PCs) or servers running more open
and interoperable, standards-based HMI and supervisory applications replaced that
proprietary master station. Broadband wireless networks or Internet protocol (IP)
technology lifted directly from the commercial world have replaced the telephone and
old-fashioned radio links. Those dumb, analog RTUs have evolved into today’s much
smarter and more functional digital RTUs. And, increasingly, industrial programmable
logic controllers (PLCs) or programmable automation controllers (PACs) are taking the
place of dedicated RTUs in many SCADA applications. We also now have a new class of
intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) that communicate with either the RTUs or directly
with the SCADA via standard protocols.

“SCADA used to be a proprietary station that reached out to RTUs with a limited number
of points and some minor control algorithms going back and forth,” says Jack Peterson,
senior project manager, energy supply and management, at Southern California Edison,
Rosemead, Calif. “Today, SCADA is more closely aligned to a DCS or specialized hybrid
control system that uses open architecture platforms and today’s high-speed networking
technology. These are combined with secure protocols and secure stations following new
guidelines, such as those issued by NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation)
and FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) in the electric industry. Now SCADAs
are sitting on top of PCs or laptops doing everything they used to do – only faster,
smarter and more connected.”
This evolution offers many advantages to end users.

“Over the last 25 years, SCADA has evolved by orders of magnitude, pushing more
intelligence from the central control room into the field and embracing standard protocols
over proprietary protocols,” says Mike Chmilewski, vice president/general manager of the
controls business at Invensys Process Systems. “This provides new degrees of freedom
for field device selection and for integrating real-time operational data with advanced
applications and business systems to enable real-time business control.”

“While SCADA was previously used as a monitoring and control system for RTUs, it now
has a broader concept,” says Prasad Pai, Proficy HMI/SCADA iFIX Product Manager at GE
Fanuc Intelligent Solutions. “PLCs have taken over much of the control, and SCADA’s
scope has expanded into new applications. Because of the flexibility of SCADA, everything
that happens in a facility can now be in a single application. What we used to think of as
DCS has now become a PLC. It all used to be in one box – both hardware and software.
Now a PLC is controlling the plant, and the software, the SCADA, is PC-based. What we
used to think of as DCS has shrunk in size, but not in functionality.”

Eduardo Ballina, GEO-SCADA business manager at Wonderware says, “The software

originally used for supervisory control has greatly increased in capability over the years.
Functionality, such as optimization simulation, and asset management, can now more
easily be incorporated into the same solution, bringing these systems from supervisory
control into the management space.”

Phil Aponte, HMI/SCADA product marketing manager at Siemens Energy and Automation,
says, “SCADA is evolving from a centralized architecture to a more distributed
architecture, and the trend is to push production data up the chain to the business. In
brownfield facilities, where DCSs, PLCs or other automation platforms from different
vendors are already in place, SCADA is also often the path of least resistance for
migration purposes.”

As SCADA moved closed, proprietary, application-specific industrial technology to more

open and interoperable commercial information technology (IT), cybersecurity became a
concern. Post-9-11 visions of terrorists or disgruntled employees hacking into a SCADA
system to disrupt the nation’s electricity grid, shut down a critical pipeline, threaten a
municipality’s water supply, blow up a tank farm or something spawned today’s thriving
cybersecurity industry. With support from the U.S. Department of Defense, Department
of Energy, Department of Homeland Security and other governmental agencies, new
cybersecurity technology has been developed and is being implemented in industrial
facilities. Important new cybersecurity standards are also emerging.

Cybersecurity has developed into a healthy specialty within the already healthy IT
consulting industry.

•And,of course, somewhere

along the line, the very
meaning of SCADA changed.
Originally, SCADA
technology was used almost
exclusively to monitor and
provide supervisory control
and management functions
remotely for industrial or
municipal operations that
extend well beyond the
physical confines of a single
plant or industrial complex.
Traditional SCADA
applications included remote
monitoring and supervisory
control for electric
transmission and distribution
networks, oil and gas pipelines, and municipal water and wastewater systems. Today, a
“SCADA” can be any HMI, supervisory or other application running in a personal
computer

As a result, SCADA technology is being implemented in some new and interesting

applications. According to George Quesada, a product manager at ABB, “SCADA has
grown by leaps and bounds in the oil and gas industry. This is particularly true in the
upstream sector, where drilling activity has been exponential in the last four years,
making it a necessity to be able to monitor and control wells, upstream compressor
stations, water injection, and well tests.”

Increasingly, elements of SCADA technology are also being used for in-plant process
control applications. Since today’s SCADA, HMI, MES and DCS systems all share many of
the same open technologies (Microsoft-based HMI, data analysis, and historian
applications; Ethernet IP; Web services; etc.) and can be used to address overlapping
applications, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between the different
systems.

This all begs questions such as, “What does a modern SCADA system look like,” “What
kind of technology does it use?” and even, “What is a SCADA application?” The answer to
all three questions pretty much appears to be, “anything goes.”
For example, the way modern SCADA technology is being applied in today’s municipal
and utility operations bears little resemblance to the traditional SCADA with which many
old-school automation professionals grew up.

Funny, It Doesn’t Look Like an RTU!

The Evansville Water and Sewer Utility (EWSU) in Evansville, Ind., has been modernizing
its automation and information infrastructure in stages over the last two years. The utility
currently pumps an average of 32 million gallons of water per day of treated water from
the Ohio River to the 150,000 people of Evansville and handles all wastewater treatment,
sanitary and combined sewer systems for the city.

InGen Technologies, based in Evansville, is a systems engineering and process control

company that has primary responsibility for designing and implementing the upgraded
automation and IT infrastructure for EWSU. This includes new process control systems for
the three treatment plants, a SCADA and public notification system for combined sewage
overflow (CSO) events and monitoring the 84 lift stations and other remote points, a
central data center and a Motorola Canopy wireless umbrella.

“The EWSU CSO project provides an excellent example of how SCADA technology is
evolving and can be used in a creative manner to ease regulatory compliance,” says
Michael Halbig, InGen’s president.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations require utilities to monitor, generate

reports and immediately notify the public about any CSOs. These can occur when the
combined sewers can’t keep up with a heavy rainfall, and either storm runoff or combined
wastewater is diverted to rivers or streams.

EWSU monitors 22 combined sewer

manholes around the city. Here, Teledyne
ISCO battery-powered, ultrasonic area-
velocity flowmeters, mounted inside the
manholes, provide both flow and level
measurements. In the past, the data stored
in the flowmeters was read once a month by
EWSU employees, who had to travel to each
location and read the historical data in each
meter using low-power, “drive-by” wireless
technology. This typically took an employee
an entire day and didn’t facilitate real-time
notification, as mandated by the EPA.

Fig. 3 According to Halbig, “The CSO project

RTU in enclosure at Long presented some interesting challenges. We
Beach Water Treatment decided to retain the existing Teledyne ISCO
flowmeters, which were doing a great job
Plant under some pretty tough environmental
conditions. To be able to provide remote, real-time access to the flowmeter data, we
installed low-cost SCADA devices mounted in compact enclosures on nearby 40-foot
poles, and ran a Modbus connection between the devices and the flowmeters. These low-
power devices from Semaphore, called T-BOXes, combine RTU-like communications and
control with onboard data collection, trending, alarming and long-term data storage, all in
one box.
We equipped the individual T-BOXes with Motorola 900 MHz ‘subscriber module’ radios
that communicate with Motorola Canopy wireless access points installed on top of three
water towers throughout the city.”

This broadband wireless umbrella now provides an efficient communications backbone for
the entire EWSU system.

“The ISCO flowmeters indicate how much, if any, combined wastewater is being diverted
to the Ohio River, and the T-BOXes automatically upload this information in real time via
the wireless umbrella to a secure server in the utility’s central data center. If for any
reason, the wireless link is lost, the individual T-BOXes retain the data until it can be
uploaded. A web server in each of the T-BOXes also provides a basic human interface and
simplifies troubleshooting, if needed, via a technician’s laptop.”

InGen also developed a custom Web application for the CSO system that allows
Evansville residents to subscribe for automatic overflow notification via email or to access
current CSO status via the utility’s website. Real-time data from the flowmeters are
automatically uploaded into this web application, thus meeting the EPA’s CSO notification
mandate. Anyone can visit this website at http://cso.evansvillegov.org/.

You call that PC a master station?

The Long Beach (California) Water Department (LBWD) provides the city’s 487,000
residents with clean drinking water, collects more than 40 million gallons of wastewater
per day, and operates and maintains nearly 765 miles of sewer lines. The complete
network includes more than 90 remote sites equipped with RTUs plus 85 major
equipment sites equipped with PLCs.

The SCADA configuration for the district’s water system gathers information from nearly
30,000 different widely dispersed data points via PLCs and RTUs. The Windows XP-based
SCADA system uses Wonderware’s InTouch HMI software for real-time visualization for
monitoring and control of the different sites. LBWD engineers programmed a PLC to poll
the 40 remote sites throughout the water system an average of once a minute.

Operators can remotely operate pumps and valves via this HMI. This is important to the
water department, since it enables the district to adjust water pressure in emergency
situations. Data inputs from the remote PLCs and RTUs are centrally stored in a
Wonderware IndustrialSQL Server historian, where the information is readily available to
operators. Wonderware trending and analysis software helps the operators predict and
avoid operational or maintenance issues and also to generate reports.

“Trending and analysis are critical components of our

water operations program because they help us to
make informed decisions to ensure proper water-
quality levels,” says Ray Gonzales, LBWD’s
telecommunications manager. “The ability to
troubleshoot potential problems and view real-time
and historical process data is invaluable for LBWD’s
overall operations.”

LBWD, which, according to Gonzalez, was an early

adopter of Wonderware HMI software, also uses the
software for its groundwater treatment facility, the
Fig. 4. largest and one of the most modern of its kind in the
LBWD Sewer United States. Here, a control system links nearly
Pump Station
SCADA display
1,500 data points from eight separate RTUs. The control system consists of two PC’s and
one data-collection server that poll the department’s 50 remote sites an average of once
every minute each day. Through continuous monitoring of the city’s sewer and storm
drains, department operators can determine if pumping stations need to reroute water
along different mains. Embedded system alarms were configured to warn operators about
potential sewer overfills. Using information from the RTUs, water department operators
can identify and locate sewer mainlines and assess lateral repair needs without
undertaking what otherwise could be very expensive street excavation.

According to LBWD’s Gonzalez, “Now that real-time data is accessible from all the remote
sites and our treatment plant, we no longer have to employ additional operators and
maintenance staff to control various equipment and pumping stations throughout the
city. The remote stations have local intelligence, which means they run as stand-alone
stations. The operators have the ability to change remote station operations by
downloading setpoints to increase or decrease flows.”

Is That a DCS or a SCADA?

At recently upgraded Formellino Wastewater Treatment Plant at Forenza, Italy, GE Fanuc
Proficy HMI/SCADA software now runs in a PC runs over a programmable automation
controller. In addition to performing traditional SCADA functions, such as data collection,
trending, reporting and alarming, the new systems provides closed-loop process control
functionality, similar to what you’d expect from a small DCS. The PAC is configured in a
redundant, hot backup fashion, similar to the manner in which many DCS controllers are
configured to provide high availability.

The old plant was run using fixed-time logic, where the sewage water was retained in the
various vessels for a predetermined time period. To improve plant processing and energy
efficiency, the new system controls the transit times of the sewage in the tanks and
machine operation based on real-time sensor data, such as oxygen, ammonia, suspended
solids and nitrates measurements.

The new control system also provides both a local operator interface in the plant as well
as relaying data via a direct Modbus/TCP link to a central off-site control room that Hera
Imola-Faenza, the company that operates the Formellino plant, mans around the clock to
be able to monitor their different plants when they are unmanned.

Novanet, a system integration and engineering firm based in Imola, Italy, designed
implemented the new SCADA and process control systems at the Formellino plant. The
redundant GE Fanuc PACs provide the local intelligence and control and interface with the
field instruments on a Profibus network using a combination of fiber optic and copper
wire. There are approximately 600 controlled tags in all. A local computer running the GE
Fanuc HMI/SCADA software collects, monitors and displays information and data for the
local daytime operators. Data from the Formellino plant is stored in Hera’s SQL database
and displayed so that a remote operator can be alerted to faults and respond if
necessary.

In the short time since the new system has been in operation, process operations have
improved and energy consumption has been reduced by 30%.

Is That a SCADA or a Decision-Support System?

Increasingly, new SCADA software applications provide critical real-time decision support
information to help companies meet new, increasingly more complex business challenges.
For example, generation management systems (GMS) extend SCADA technology to
enable electric utility companies to operate successfully in the newly competitive,
deregulated environment.

In one example, Invensys’ Foxboro SCADA group and a large, U.S. investor-owned
electric utility designed a new GMS that enabled the utility to accurately determine its net
energy position. This is critical for effective power supply scheduling and purchasing. The
GMS provides:

• Improved ability to control generation schedules through implementation of

automatic generation control;
• Advanced calculation engine to calculate net energy short and long conditions,
losses applied to schedules and multiple ramp rates over a time base;
• Historical data collection, including short- and long-term data capture in a
Microsoft SQL-compatible format;
• Forecasting tools, including real-time and historical trending, wind modeling and
qualified facilities modeling.

For high availability, a completely

redundant architecture of four servers was
implemented. This includes two servers in
the primary control center and two in a
backup control center.

The Invensys GMS enables the utility’s

real-time operations group to determine
accurately the company’s net energy
position in real time. This capability is
essential to allow the utility to compete
Fig. 5 effectively in the various electricity markets
Formellino Wastewater in which it participates, while optimizing
Treatment Plant the utilization of its power generation
assets.

The Future of SCADA

So what does the future hold for SCADA users?

According to LBWD’s Gonzalez, “SCADA technology is getting to the point where the
software can be programmed to take care of everything from controlling pumps and
valves to bypassing problematic processors to automatically restarting a halted PLC or
frozen PC. Already, my computers run around the clock and pretty much take care of
themselves, though my technical staff check them weekly to verify communications.”

Wonderware’s Ballina adds, “Software distribution and management of very large

systems will continue to improve. Easier access to larger bandwidth communications and
the associate technology will continue to displace earlier modes and bring many SCADA
systems from the scheduled poling schemes to continuous or near-continuous
communications.”

SCE’s Peterson says, “The open architecture has allowed SCADA to morph from the old
hard-wired days to what it is today, and I only see the SCADA architecture getting more
open and non-proprietary. This includes both hardware and software platforms. I also
think that we’ll see multiple applications running on one SCADA platform. For example,
instead of just doing a little supervisory control and data acquisition, I think you’ll
probably see some high-level batch applications doing things across blends, or detailed
control applications working across different RTUs, while the high-level batch is running.
In a large process plant, the DCS will still be your workhorse, but outside the plant, you’ll
have SCADA applications that can keep running even if the communications are lost.”

Clearly, the distinctions between SCADA, DCS, PLC, PAC, HMI, MES and other technology
categories and application spaces will become even less defined and less important as
these technologies and applications continue to merge via the adoption of common
industry standards and commercial IT technologies and approaches.

SCADA vs. DCS

While the line between SCADA and DCS appears to be blurring a bit, some important
distinctions remain.

“Distributed Control Systems are very deterministic in nature. SCADA operates in a less
deterministic, ‘select before operate,’ environment, where the control will periodically
time out or deactivate for safety or security reasons. You’d almost never see that happen
in a deterministic DCS,” says Invensys’ Chmilewski. “Another distinction is that, with
SCADA, the hardware and software can be separate platforms. With a DCS, the hardware
and software are bound together into one platform. Most SCADA today still deals with
out-of-plant activities, often across widely distributed assets. However, it’s not
uncommon for a SCADA system to sit over and provide supervisory functions for multiple
different in-plant systems, such as process control, HVAC and laboratory systems,” says
Chmilewski.

Wonderare’s Ballina adds, “Distributed control systems are very process-centric and focus
on controlling the process. SCADA systems are more data-centric and focus on gathering
data while performing supervisory control only. DCSs are permanently connected to their
associated hardware, which is typically in one location. SCADA systems connect to widely
distributed equipment and are better designed to deal with low bandwidth intermittent
communications.”

ABB’s Quesada explains the differences between DCS and SCADA as follows:

While a DCS will typically have a relatively small number of I/O concentrated at a single
site, a SCADA system will typically have a large number of I/O spread over multiple sites.
A DCS is controller-centric, and those controllers will typically be made by the DCS
vendor; SCADA is system-centric and can communicate with many different brands of
RTUs and PLCs. A DCS is designed to communicate with controllers over a high-speed
network; SCADA is designed to communicate over many different communications media
and often at low speeds. DCSs are designed for very fast data acquisition (measured in
milliseconds); SCADA data acquisition operates at moderate speeds (measured in
seconds). The respective approaches to fault-tolerance and recovery also differ. DCSs
have redundant hot servers, preventing disruption in the event of switchover. With
SCADA systems, the redundant server will be in standby mode, requiring seconds to
switchover. Unlike most DCSs, SCADA systems also have the ability to buffer data locally
when communications are interrupted, enabling the upper level SCADA station catch up
with no data loss once communications are restored. This is known as “store and forth of
data.”