Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition is generally known as SCADA. In general it denotes to the computer system which usually monitor and control a process, as the industrial control system. These processes may be industrial type, facility typed or infrastructure based. These processes are described below;

• Industrial process refers to the process which runs in a repetitive, batch, continuous and a distinct manner. This process includes the manufacturing, fabrication and refining.

• Facility based process occur in both public and private facilities. it also observe in the buildings, space stations, airports and ships. They control and monitor the energy consumption and HVAC.

• Infrastructural process may be occurred in both and public and private facility. This includes collection of waste material and treatment, distribution of water and its treatment, transmission of the electrical power and its distribution, and large communication system.

Common system components

A SCADA system commonly consist of the following subsystem

• HMI or human machine interface is the setup which sends data to the human operator and by this human operator control and monitor all the processes.
• A supervisory (computer) system, which acquire the data on the process and control the process.
• Sensors are connected to the remote control units (RTU) to the process, which convert signals to the digital data and send this digital data to the supervisory computer system.
• Programmable Logic Controller (PLCs) are used as field device as they are more flexible and economical than the special purpose RTUs.

• The remote control units are connected with the supervisory system with the communication infrastructure.

The abbreviation generally refers the systems which are centralized and are capable of monitoring and controlling the complete site, or the complexities of the system which is spread out over the large areas (something between industrial plant & a country). Most controlling actions are automatically performed by PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) or RTUs (Remote Terminal Units). Host control functions may generally be restricted to fundamental overriding and/or the level of supervisory intervention. For instance, a PLC could control the flow of water being cooled by the part of industrial process, but SCADA system could allow the their operators to make changes of setting the points for flow of water, and enable the alarm conditions, like when flow is being lost and temperature is getting high which can be recorded as well as displayed. The control loop of feedback passes by the PLC or RTU, while overall performance of loop is being monitored by SCADA system.

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