Industrial Engineer · phase 7 of 16
SCADA
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system that monitors and supervises distributed controllers and process equipment.
The Explain card
- Plain English
- SCADA is the supervisory layer above the controllers. It gathers data from many PLCs and remote units, shows the whole process on one set of screens, records history and alarms, and sends setpoints back down.
- Example
- A pipeline control room watches forty pumping stations on a SCADA system. The stations run themselves on local controllers, and the room sees flows, pressures and alarms from all of them.
- Why it matters
- SCADA supervises and rarely controls directly, so a lost SCADA server should leave the machines running. When someone designs it so the PLCs depend on it, one server outage becomes a plant outage.
- Hook
- The control room, for everything at once.
Word knowledge
How the word is built, where it came from, and what it sits beside in memory.
In a sentence
During commissioning, the engineer verifies that the SCADA screen reports the pump's run feedback and discharge pressure from the remote PLC.
Letter by letter
- S Supervisory indicates higher-level oversight
- C Control refers to commands and setpoints
- A And joins the two main word groups
- D Data covers values, states and events
- A Acquisition means collecting signals from field systems
Where it came from
- Origin
- English initialism formed from Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition
- Entered the language
- 1970s
- What changed
- It began as a label associated mainly with computerized utility and pipeline control, then spread throughout industrial automation.
How it is spelled
- Capitalisation
- Written SCADA in capitals, including mid-sentence
- Plural and possessive
- Prefer SCADA systems for the plural; write SCADA's for the singular possessive and SCADA systems' for the plural possessive
- Out loud
- Said as a word, not spelled out.
Same family
- PLC
- DCS
- HMI
- RTU
Broken into chunks
-
SC
- supervisory control
- sequence control
-
ADA
- and data acquisition
- automatic data acquisition
Where it sits in the deck
Phase 7: PLC Related Automation Systems
The neighbours a PLC lives beside on a plant floor, from operator panels and SCADA up to the motion and batch systems it hands work to.
