A SCADA system is an animated program which, as the name suggests, allows an operator to supervise the day to day running of an industrial plant. It also provides a quick and easy method of controlling the plant. It does this by displaying the site on a computer screen as a group of windows (graphic mimics) which represent the site in an animated form. Any part of the plant can be monitored and controlled from its individual screen. A plant can be fully controllable from the SCADA as well as allowing for manual use at the same time and can shut down the entire plant at the touch of a button.

In order to maintain a high security level a SCADA has restricted security access. A username and password are required for the SCADA to respond to any commands. A SCADA system can control every aspect of the plant and it could be disasterous, if an untrained user had full access to the system. To prevent this, different levels of access are required for different controls. Each possible group of users have different access levels and passwords, for example an operator has a lower access level than a scientist and so on.

Most SCADA systems have an alarm management system which is used for keeping track of any faults or irregularities within the plant. The piece of plant which is in alarm is highlighted on the mimic window, for example, by a change in colour of the drive, valve etc and a text alarm is displayed. There is also an alarm history viewer which allows logged alarm events and conditions to be viewed and acknowledged. Another feature within most SCADAs is real and historical trending. Which allow an operator to view time based views of the process data. Datalogging is also present in a SCADA and the tag database can be configured to log itself to any storage media or printer. All alarms and events can be logged for most databse and sreadsheet applications.

PLCs (Programmable logic Controllers)
HMIs (Human Machine Interfaces)
SCADAs (Supervisory Control And Data Aquasition)
Network Solutions
Programmed Languages