Are you Alert or just Waiting dear M2M machine

ALERT

Are you alert, or is it just waiting for the situation to pass.  Are you alert for something which might happen, something perhaps with danger requiring your constant situational awareness, or is it just waiting for the expected alarm when the pressure gets to high.

To what extent we confuse normal events, like the sun coming up and the sun going down with an alert meaning something just broke and you are in trouble or security was breached and you need to shutdown or burn everything.

Alerts are the output of a process which is monitoring the 'danger' domain, and the production of alerts needs to be meaningful, particularly when possibly mixed with Alarms, Events, Off-Normals and basic normal data.

How might we best characterize them ?

• Normal Data : No need to look at it - no need to act - maybe to fine tune - maybe to optimize, but no real danger involved and not a high priority.
• Event Data : Events record what happens, usually on a change of status of an item of plant, or perhaps an operator action for later audit purposes.
• ALARM : Alarms record a transgression of a limit or potential hazard developing.  Alarms are useful for managing situations post a disturbance event.
• ALERT : Alerts are a new category for most and I like to refer to Alerts as being from a higher form of intelligence and or situational awareness which characterize and inform of imminent danger or unexpected behaviour.

When observing animal behavior in the wild, you will see that the animal engages all of it's senses and the senses of it's herd to determine whether there is danger or not.  Animals often go from relaxed or waiting to high stages of alert within seconds based on the situation.  It is generally not just one input, but many which need to be correlated to determine that 'danger exists' and it is the function of 'situational assessment' to figure out whether 'danger' could exist.

Whether real-time systems are intelligent enough to correlate enough data to provide a higher level of reasoning required for an ALERT is a debate to be had, however we are now approaching the levels of computing and industrial software capability to provide a higher order ALERT system rather than the simpler more fundamental Data, Events and Alarm systems currently implemented.

Photo: Alert by paralog  under licence CC BY-ND 2.0

Englebart and Bose As We Might Think and hear Mr Mouse..

As we might think of them...

This last month, July 2013 saw the passing of two great American electrical engineers of our mum's and dad's generation. We read obits. about Amar Bose and Doug Engelbart, both pioneers of the development of new technology for our next industrial information revolution.

Evolution of SCADA Technologies - 1

C25 Remote Terminal Unit

There is nothing quite like working for a controls automation and engineering company for bringing high social-wc3-tech warriors down to earth. Probably uppermost in a controls product manager's mind is the support of long term useful plugged in technology. The automation that manages the control of plant and infrastructure is very static, and I have to say, totally anti-social.  Yes, believe it or not, social networking is NOT required to enable control systems to work.

The photo shows a single board Remote Terminal Unit, originally created in the 1980s using VME bus technology.  This was called the C25.  Although the C25 is now classed as obsolete, there are still many of these in operation on critical infrastructure throughout the world.  These days we replace these older remotes with the newer modular Foxboro RTU technologies.  The fit is close.. but not exact.  Features of the older technology which tend to change are the:-

• Wiring connectors - Older terminations
• Communications - instead of using Bell 202 we might use TCP/IP
• Protocol - instead of using Conitel - we might use DNP3
• User Programs - now here is the real challenge - these were generally built in older languages - early derivatives of BASIC or C programming - these days we might transition these to SALL programming with it's more protected logic code. IEC 1131 standard programming might also be required. 

Many of the components on these boards are difficult to find.  Repairing them is a challenge.  We tend to create newer technologies which try to extend the role and function of the older technologies, with a minimal installation cost.  I decided to read the book by Kevin Kelley - "What Technology Wants".  I believe that there is something about the use of these technologies, which have to remain in place without moving, without disconnecting, and without modification for over 30 years, which has to be explained.  I will be doing more posts on this topic as I embark on my travels in the next month or so.