SCADA is Elephants and Turtles all the way down

We had just moved some of our SCADA engineering to the Invensys facility in West Durrington, Worthing, UK. Worthing is down by the beach not far west of Brighton on the English channel. Not far from Worthing, if you go up past Arundel, is Goodwood, the home of the famous racing circuit among other things.  I found the Cass Sculpture park there and wandering around on a weekend. I stumbled across Tony Cragg's public sculpture. I like this one in particular for it's topology, and for today's post I think it relevant in the discussion on the general form of SCADA systems. This post includes a Turchin style dialog on SCADA, what is it and what does it mean. It also includes a general discussion on metasystems and holons and how SCADA architectures themselves include aspect of these higher level concepts.  So if you are brave... read on...

Engineering the Semantic Plant

Engineering complex close fitting encapsulated control systems for plants requires the incorporation of a number of data capture and review processes to eliminate the post start up operational risk as early as possible in the project time frame.

While the 'semantic web' continues to take shape with SPARQL and RDP/OWL databases and their definition taking shape in ISO 15926 construction communities, Invensys is building up the core tools, templates, rules bases and workbench processes to take on larger and larger plant designs in collaboration with it's customers.

Reflected Doyle Spirals - F Decomite [Flickr] [ CC ]

The Doyle Spiral as depicted in Reflected Doyle Spirals beautifully traces the packing of ever increasing circle size in sets of interlocking coloured spirals. These sets have aspects of encapsulation, increasing scale, close fitting components and simple recursive rules to define their behaviour. It is my view that engineering highly scalar control and safety systems follows similar structures, and as such, we might keep in mind how best to frame the close fitting data exchanges between different companies and engineering teams in order to make them equally elegant.

Universal IO - Then end of the Marshalling Panel

Ever since the ability to quickly compute and the creation of electronic configurations, we've seen companies struggle with trying to quickly develop consistent configurations from a top down logical design basis.  The advent of object oriented systems has enabled configuration to be partitioned in uniquely named environments.  If only the real world would comply with the lovely abstract designs we have on the computer screen.

Engineering : The Industrial and Social Revolution

National Railway Museum - York, UK

It's Charles Dickens' anniversary, he the great novelist whose commentary on the social state in the industrial revolution, might have been interested to see how science and engineering turned out 112 years hence his famous novel about the industrial revolution.

With the huge development of the social networking jungle out their, I am pleased to see how engineers worldwide are adapting professional discussion groups to maintain a healthy interest in the development of Engineering Standards. How engineering itself has changed since its first real convocation during the Industrial Revolution where locomotives are named after the King, through to the Social Revolution.....