INTRODUCTION
SCADA or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems are being widely deployed in a wide range of industries such as Manufacturing Plants, Water Treatment Plants, Processing Industries, Power Substations, Integrated City Management Systems, Advanced Traffic Management Systems and Integrated Rail and Transport Systems.
SCADA is a productivity tool to help owners better manage their processes and improve operational and management efficiency. SCADA systems are complex systems that encompass a wide range of technologies.
We live in an era where SCADA generates a lot of excitement – The idea of monitoring, controlling and managing entire operations of a large plant or system from the desktop, by merely looking at graphical pictures of the operations is like playing your favourite video game. After the initial excitement, comes the boredom of looking at the same graphics day-after-day. Then the red dots start flashing on the screen ….soon many more red dots appear. For the engineer this becomes a nightmare as they rush to fix the red dots. For the asset owner, suddenly nobody is working on improving the plant processes – everyone is too busy fixing the SCADA. This is unfortunately is a real-life scenario in a lot of SCADA installations in Malaysia.
There is a need to increase our skills to fully understand the technologies that come with SCADA. With the advent of Information Technology, SCADA is moving from the engineering domain more towards the Information. Technology domain and this not only creates opportunities but also creates huge challenges to the engineering community and the end customers deploying SCADA.
The programme will cover the principles SCADA and Automation Systems, the different components of SCADA and the infra-structure necessary to deploy SCADA. It will explain the technologies behind SCADA and will introduce some real-life examples of SCADA applications, and will discuss the challenges faced by local companies in deploying SCADA and Automation Systems.