PC Based SCADA Software

[Paullys50]

Have used almost everything except Archie's one and will give that a go now it has an Omron driver.
It depends what you require - I would say to you that if trending and graphing is the most important requirement I would use Citect - now known as Vijeo Citect.
In my view it has the very best trending capabilities of any SCADA system and the best built in trend display pages.
You can also use a trigger to start and stop trending when something is running or not and the trend files are really quite tiny an efficient - you do not need massive hard drives to say trend 100 odd values for 12 months. I had a job where I was trending 700 values for a 12 month period - some as often as far less than 1 second scan (frequency every 100ms) in a power station. I think the drive was only 500 meg and it never filled up.
I have not looked at another SCADA system for a job for years now and some of the others may have improved with respect to trending.
I hear Ignition is pretty good but have not looked at trending with it or the size of the files - I have had a look at the whole application and it looks pretty good.
By the way, Schneider seem to be buying most of the bid SCADA manufacturers - there have been several lately. From past history they will be Schneiderised or dropped leaving people in the poo! I doubt they will ever drop Citect due to the huge user base in Australia and elsewhere in the world but who knows. They have a very good SCADA system from Canada that is designed for remote I/O (RTU) applications as well and seem to be pushing that very hard into the market place. I find it not very intuitive though.
FIX 32 was the last time I used FIX - not impressed with a few exceptions. There are a few things in FIX that I would like to see in every SCADA system from a programmers point of view but far too many things I did not like.
By the way, Citect supports SQL. Citect was also used for the biggest SCADA system in the world - Olympic Dam in Oz. I think the last count was 1.25 million tags - Citect dials out to remotes - remotes dial in to Citect - every posible configuration taken care of. The overall scan time for the system with that many tags was less than 2 seconds - pretty impressive for 10-15 years ago! I hear there has been more added and if the extension goes ahead there will be heaps more. There are a LOT of redundant servers! Not where you are of course, or most of us, but interesting none the less.
Hope this helps.
By the way, I have been programming Citect, and will be on and off for the next 3-5 years, at Tidbinbilla Tracking Station in Canberra for CSIRO/NASA. They are most impressed with the improved trending capabilities.

BobB -

Just sharing some information. Ignition logs historical data to a database, not log files. So depending on how much data, how fast you pull it will shape how fast the database grows. I was at the Ignition Community Conference this year, and one of the presentations was a port of a Citect project over to Ignition. This particular process had operators using non-stop trending to monitor the process. I think between 3 operators they had 16-20 monitors full of trends that they were monitoring, some trends had 20-30 pens.

Ignition replaced this application, however one of the challenges was that the Ignition trending system didn't provide a lot of options when it came to "out-of-the-box" ad-hoc trending during run-time. So the integrator could not re-create all the functionality that the Citect system was providing. Ignition has improved this, but they have a way to go to make a truly runtime-configurable trending system. At this point, it was clear to the integrator that the Citect system was more capable in-terms of trending ability. As much as this seems like an example of where Ignition couldn't match functionality of a competing system, it actually highlighted the power of Ignition. Just because Ignition didn't have an "out-of-the-box" solution didn't mean that the integrator couldn't make their own using what was available to them in Ignition.

The integrator ended up writing some impressive code in Ignition to expose additional features of the trending system. They were able to create extensions to expose functions of the trending system which Ignition wasn't using, (from my interpretation) it was really a matter of bringing those options to the foreground to be used. Once they were able to expose/create the required additional functionality, they were able to replicate all the features of trending within Ignition to match what the plant was so accustomed to using in Citect.

So while it took some leg work to accomplish, the Ignition platform had all the tools to do it. It was quite an impressive project to hear about (as they created development tools within Ignition to aid in the port), and I hope that Ignition will someday have the demonstrated trending functionality natively so I can use it!

 

[BobB]

I guess it is relative - I do not have time to get down and dirty and do those sorts of things - too busy. It is also possible to do all that in Citect of course. You can make your own trend pages and do as you wish with code. I am certainly going to try Archie's system now that it has an Omron FINS driver though. It will be for myself at home to monitor my orchid shade houses. As it is for myself and no money will exchange hands I will take the time to see what can be done when I have five minutes - that is the difficult part - finding the time - so busy.

 

[JesperMP]

Can anyone recommend some good software for PC based SCADA/HMI.

So what is meant by "good" ?
To some free = good.
Other find simple, robust and industrial = good.
And some find fully fledged hi-end = good.

Are you guys sure this isnt just a spam post ?
Why bother to answer when the op cant even specify what he really want ?