On behalf of SA Instrumentation and Control and its readers we salute the scada vendors, SIs and their end-users who responded to this, our 10th SAI&C scada review. We believe that through their actions, these individuals and organisations epitomise the high-road response to the current economic downturn.
The immediate differences that we noticed between last year’s responses and this year’s is that with the exception of one raw water project and one food project, the subject projects are all in the mining and metallurgical industries. Perhaps this reflects the fact that such projects have greater momentum than in other industries.
It will be interesting to see next year’s mix.
Taking a stand
Some readers may take exception to the tone of the introduction to this year’s scada review – it contains a healthy dose of constructive criticism. Based on the responses we have a genuine concern that those responsible for selecting and engineering scada systems are not giving sufficient consideration to key aspects sufficiently early in project lifecycles. This could lead to decisions being made on subjective rather than objective criteria – lowering the competitiveness of individual companies and the South African economy as a whole.
Project accounting
Despite the fact that the projects are all undertaken by significant vendors, engineering contractors, SIs and end-users, we have had difficulty in obtaining objective assessments of metrics such as man-hour per tag or cost per I/O point for both engineering/configuration and for licensing.
Is this because respondents lack this information, or because they are reluctant to share it?
And what calculations are end users applying to lifecycle cost per tag or for the system as a whole during project justification?
Between now and next year’s review we hope to delve into these and other significant project metrics to see how we can improve reporting in this area.
Innovation
From a front-end integration perspective, the ClearSCADA project is particularly interesting. Front ends range from conventional PLCs through telemetry RTUs to flowmeters that call home – periodically sending data to the scada via e-mail.
The Wondware project in Tanzania stands out because the SI, Systems Anywhere, has incorporated an Expert System complete with fuzzy logic to optimise the milling circuits.
At the other end of the system architecture, Rockwell’s 50 000 tag project in Madagascar features an integrated architecture from PLCs all the way up to SAP through MS SQL and SAP’s xApp Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence product.
Technology usage vs. 2008
Many of the trends that we commented on last year remain firmly entrenched:
* End-user adoption of web services remains slow, despite the benefits that this technology offers for integration between disparate systems operating in different timeframes (realtime vs. delayed data).
* Intrusion detection does not get much of a look in, with efforts stopping at the provision of firewalls for intrusion protection.
* Few respondents report any pre-engineering efforts to determine expected performance under full load and during abnormal failure conditions: at best, any such work is being performed post-engineering at factory acceptance.
* Formalised backup and restore of configuration data gets less attention that it deserves.
Other technology observations
End users do not maximise their use of the features that scada vendors promote as the latest and greatest scada killer apps:
* Respondents are not talking about the benefits of comparative KPIs and dashboards.
* Only one respondent mentions asset management.
* Only one is incorporating GIS data.
* Alarm management standards are left to the system, with no mention of specific strategies and operating targets.
Other areas of concern that arise from the responses:
* Respondents do not consider standalone systems to be at risk from intrusion.
* Other than, in some cases formalising colour standards for device state (running, tripped, interlocked …) there is no consideration given to new thinking in human engineering of HMIs.
Looking forward
We look forward to bring readers more detailed information on these and other scada projects throughout the coming year and being able to feature a host of new products and applications in the 2010 scada review.
Please let us have your ideas as to how we can tailor this to best suit readers’ interests by dropping a mail to andrew.ashton@technews.co.za.
Notes:
1. Some reviewer responses have been edited due to space considerations.
2. The order of appearance of reviews is based on the order in which they were received.
3. A 'No' response to a question does not necessarily mean that the scada system under review lacks that feature – only that the feature was not implemented in the subject project.
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