Hands-on SCADA

01 April 2007

A recent application of Adroit Technologies SCADA package has allowed engineers to view plant values, history data and trend data on mobile devices

Adroit has helped a company that required engineers to have access to real-time and historical SCADA data, whilst working on live plant equipment. The solution also allowed inspection of values and trends for plant parameters. The engineers access Adroit using a mobile device, such as a PDA or Smartphone, and can then connect to any Adroit SCADA server available on the network. Once connected, tag values are browsed and displayed as either real time values, tabular history data, a real time trend or copied for use in pocket Word or pocket Excel.

Traditionally Adroit has provided numerous API’s exposing its SCADA server’s object model to the outside world, and thereby allowing the creation of third-party applications. Ranging from DDE in the very early days, through OLE Automation, Active X, OPC Client and Server, ODBC, ADO/SQL OLE DB. Now the company’s most recent offering of open system APIs is the Adroit Web Service.

This service allows the engineers to deploy the Web Service on one or more of their plant or IT server machines. Subject to suitable security authentication provisions, this allows visibility of the real-time and historical tag values resident in any Adroit server accessible to the machine hosting the Web Service.

Utilising industry standard SOAP and XML protocols, the following alphabetical list of operations are offered to client applications once attached to the Web Service:

Connect - Connects to any Adroit Server visible to the attached instance of the Web Service

Disconnect - Close the connection to the connected Adroit Server

GetAgentMembers - Returns an array of all tags of the specified type

GetAgentTypes - Returns an array of all available tag types

GetHistoricalData - Returns historical data for the defined period and logged tag property

GetServerList - Returns a list of available Adroit servers to connect

GetSlot - Returns the requested tag property

GetSlotArray - Returns an array of requested tag properties

GetSlotInfo - Returns an array of all accessible properties of the specified tag

PutSlot - Sets the value of a tag property

Subscribe - Set up a subscription to a tag property

SubscribeBulk - Set up subscription to an array of tag properties

Unsubscribe - Terminates active subscription

The list of operations above is extremely generic in nature, and yet sufficiently complete to empower the creation of virtually any kind of client application in any programming language: C#, VB.NET, J#, etc, and on any platform offering .NET support.

Another application currently in development using the Web Service and its associated connectivity options, is a generic, sample Web Site. This is claimed to allow users of Adroit to very rapidly put together a Web portal offering real-time and historical Adroit tag information to anyone, anywhere, with the correct security credentials using a Web browser such as Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera, etc