scada

haai,

a client of ours asked us if it's possible to visualize his whole plant, most of the machines have their own PLC's, some are Siemens, some AB, some ...,

is it possible to connect all those pls's with one SCADA-program and, if yes, what program can pull this job?

thanks in advance,
Mathias

Ooooooooooooooh Brother...

Short answer: yes.

How? Now the long answer.

1. Direct collection or indirect collection?

Direct collection means you communicate to each PLC in some manner and poll data directly, typically with OPC driver and software.

Indirect collection means you have a separate PLC "rides shotgun" on the machine controller, reading the machine PLC's IO points. It collects information and transmits it back to the data collection software.

Direct is software driven, and each approach to every machine is different (different drivers, values). Indirect needs more hardware ($) but after the initial system is set up, the rest are "fill-in-the-blanks" and set up alot quicker. Also, it's completely platform-independent, so siemens/ab/unitronics is irrelevant to indirect collection.

Wonderware is very good at direct collection, they have very little provision for indirect. Rockwell (Plantmetrics) is good at indirect collection, and can do direct as well. This verstility is what won me over to Plantmetrics - more options is a good thing.

Good luck!

TM

Hey Mathias,

The SCADA system we use Citect can connect to alot of plc systems.

for a list of availble drivers look here

Drivers list

hope this helps

Greetz,

Marsupilami

Yep!!! Citect will connect to almost anything with inbuilt drivers. Buy the package and get the lot with the exception of AB and a few others who require a licence be purchased for each installation of Citect.

I have one Citect job running with Omron Controller Link, Modbus RTU, Ethernet and BACnet. Had to purchase the BACnet driver and it was not an insignificant sum.