Supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) play a critical role in collecting process data from across distributed systems and making it available across an organization. But what if you need to share that data beyond your firewall? What are the keys to doing so efficiently and safely? Control talked with Chris Little, media relations director for VTScada by Trihedral, about new and not-so-new ways to share data on a massive scale.
Q: What are some common scenarios where SCADA users must share process data outside of their organization?
A: Once upon a time, it was mostly big players who needed to worry about providing this kind of access and they typically had the resources to do it safely. These days, even the smallest systems need to put their historical data to work beyond firewalls.
The most common scenario is reporting. While our VTScada software has powerful built-in reporting, many users have business requirements that involve other platforms, like Excel Reporter or Dream Report.
Sometimes they export to dashboarding applications such as eRIS that provide operators with a normalized view of KPIs based on data from a variety of business systems.
Another scenario is regulatory compliance. For example, small and mid-sized systems are not exempt from sharing data with regulatory organizations to confirm emissions. Increasingly, SCADA applications must share data with data analytics systems including those using artificial intelligence (AI) to find efficiencies and define best practices that will reduce costs, increase safety and extend the life of their critical infrastructure.
Q: What are the standard methods and protocols for doing so?
A: Most SCADA systems, including VTScada, use standard industry interfaces such as OPC, ODBC and REST to provide access to third-party systems. Unlike most other SCADA platforms, VTScada has its own pre- configured Enterprise Historian, which accelerates integration, and adds to the robustness and longevity of the system. This makes it even easier for us to allow other business systems to query the Historian as if it were a standard relational database without the need for shaky custom coding.
The latest version of VTScada introduces a modern data publishing method based on the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT. This leverages a publish/subscribe model that scales much more easily than traditional polling. The new VTScada Sparkplug B Publisher allows you to configure an application as a powerful Edge node that can publish local I/O data to MQTT Brokers, where business systems or other SCADA applications can easily subscribe to them. Sparkplug B is an open-source specification built on MQTT for industrial data exchange. It provides a standardized way to communicate in an MQTT network. VTScada has supported standard Sparkplug B for several years.
Configuring VTScada applications as Edge nodes using our new SparkPlug B Publisher offers several advantages over the typical Edge hardware devices which provide limited local data buffering and redundancy.
VTScada Historian can store logged data indefinitely and makes it easy to set up local redundancy. This makes your whole system more robust, even if that remote site loses network access.
The publish/subscribe model is much more flexible and lets you scale up your application in a way that traditional methods don't do easily. Our Sparkplug B Publisher makes setting this up very simple and straightforward.
