Articles and News

The SCADA system was installed for a water and wastewater infrastructure automation project at the city of Fair Oaks Ranch, TX.

The free app enables users to graph and analyze environmental data collected with Onset HOBO MX Series data loggers.

By Christopher Little, Trihedral Replacing an existing system can present opportunities that are unavailable when building a SCADA system from scratch. This article outlines four concepts, or pillars, to support your search for new SCADA software that will help you build on the value of your existing system and grow with your changing needs well into the future.

This is partly because SCADA products are mostly used in large investments in the energy business—such as in oil and gas and power facilities—an area that is performing better than other sectors.

OSI has been awarded seven contracts by a Joint Utility Procurement (JUP) project to deliver seven SCADA/EMS systems.

The facility for Transelec unifies all of the company’s regional control centers throughout the country, allowing 24 hour surveillance of operations, efficiently and safely.

Catalog covers telemetry products that support long-distance wireless communications in large scale environments such as those found in oil and gas, agriculture, water systems, forestry and public infrastructures.

CyTime Sequence of Events Recorders (SER) and GPS time synchronization products are now suitable for use in European and Australian mission critical facilities.

Linux has long been on the “wishlist" for control systems. Until now, most systems have been locked-in to the Windows operating system due to reliance on classic OPC—a ubiquitous communication standard based on Microsoft’s Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM). The name of the game is changing, however, with the arrival of the next-generation OPC standard, the OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA). The new standard was designed for cross-platform compatibility, which makes room for Linux to gain popularity in the automated control industry.

By Rich Hunzinger, B-Scada With all of the opportunities presented by today's data-driven enterprise, the time has come to consider whether your SCADA system is limiting your potential.

By Edward Nugent, PcVue The implementation of Cybersecurity under the NIST Framework is ultimately the responsibility of the SCADA Application owner and operator as it encompasses the entire system including the organization developing the SCADA application, the corporate networks and computers that it runs on and the control devices and instrumentation attached to it.

Kliux Energies in Spain selected Advanticsys’ remote monitoring technology to manage their renewable-energy generation facilities.

By Randy Miller, Honeywell Modern technologies and practices have been proven to reduce incidents in the main control center by more than 30 percent and sustain safe, optimal availability. Furthermore, capturing best operator practices in a procedural operations framework and equipment based templates helps retain best practices for future generations.

AlarmAgent.info makes a system OPC-compatible, enhancing its existing real-time reporting features by sharing data communication with HMI / SCADA software and third-party customized applications.

By Rick Zabel, Publisher & Editor Since Schneider Electric's purchase of Invensys, I have been waiting to hear some news about the integration of the two companies. That news, as it relates to software, was delivered last week at Schneider Electric's first Global Software Customer Conference.

Iberdrola Renewables in Oregon uses a SCADA system from PcVue in its National Control Center to monitor every turbine at every wind farm throughout the country. Iberdrola has 2,479 wind turbines, each with 300 to 350 data points, which equates to 700,000 to 850,000 I/O data points on more than 20 servers.

B-Scada will be creating a wholly-owned subsidiary in Spain with new offices scheduled to open on November 1st 2014.

By Bill Lydon, Editor Should the control room operator be responsible for making business decisions? Focusing solely on improving operator interaction may be a mistake. Your competitors may be focusing on increased automation and integration to gain a competitive business advantage.

OSI installed an Outage Management System (OMS) for Powerco of New Zealand, based on OSI's Spectra OMS software platform.

By Bill Lydon, Editor The OPC Foundation Information Revolution 2014 Conference was held at Microsoft's Redmond Campus on August 4-7, 2014. The conference featured industry experts who both presented and learned more about OPC Unified Architecture. This article summarizes the highlights from the conference.