The Remote Gate Diverse System

'Cloud Gate' - Millenium Park Chicago

Today's blog post is inspired by Anish Kapoor's beautiful 'Cloud Gate' in Chicago.    It is a public sculpture to play and interact with in any weather.  I aim to go see it touch it with one finger and look at the city go by one day. The blog post itself is just like that - a single touch to a gate of the kind of diverse engineering which takes place at remote locations. [The photo courtesy of  Lisa Yarost.]

Most people think of remote terminal units and remote systems as an atomic black box, doing a certain job, somewhere far off, with a means to communicate. The black box has become a citadel, a complex arrangement of interacting intelligent devices which need a gate through which to communicate.

What does it look like inside that far off citadel, and what kind of architectures support it ?.  What follows is a brief introduction to the story of the development of the Gated Diverse Architecture.

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...