1.1 Market Overview
SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems, also known as data acquisition and monitoring control systems, are essential basic systems for industrial process automation and informatization, similar to DCS and PLC, primarily functioning to remotely acquire and monitor data. Originating in the 1970s, SCADA systems have evolved from being based on dedicated computers and operating systems to being based on general-purpose computers, distributed computer networks, and database technologies, enabling large-scale networking. SCADA systems have now reached their third generation and beyond. They exhibit an open architecture; in the mid-1990s, SCADA manufacturers and solution providers increasingly chose open communication protocols such as IEC 60870-5-101/104, IEC 61850, DNP3 serial, and DNP3 LAN/WAN. This allowed users to more easily select from products from various vendors to achieve optimized "hybrid matching" during system development. In the late 1990s, I/O manufacturers continued to move towards openness, increasingly favoring open message structures like MODBUS RTU/ASCII. After 2000, with the widespread acceptance of Ethernet in industrial applications, most of the SCADA market still adopted Ethernet technology. The "software as a service" concept also permeated various aspects of SCADA.
Due to the evolution of SCADA systems across three generations, industrial internet technology has increasingly permeated the third-generation SCADA systems. We have clearly observed that the rapid development of ICT communication systems has greatly influenced the architecture of SCADA, and this will continue to be true in the future. SCADA systems have expanded to collect and monitor data from moving processes, devices, and workflows, enabling ubiquitous and real-time SCADA.
The eForceConSCADA system scheduling platform software V5.0 covers applications from field monitoring stations to dispatch centers, providing enterprises with complete production information collection and integration services from bottom to top, thereby providing a support platform for enterprises' comprehensive automation, factory digitalization and complete "integrated management and control" solutions.
1.2 SCADA Applications and Functions
In practical applications, SCADA has a wider range of applications than DCS and PLC. Its applications are generally divided into three categories: The first category is industrial processes, including processing and manufacturing, production, power generation, assembly, oil refining, and petrochemicals; based on the media being processed, it is divided into continuous, batch, and discrete processes. The second category is infrastructure, including waterworks and water supply networks, wastewater and sewage networks and sewage treatment, oil/gas pipelines, power transmission and supply, large-scale communication systems, and urban alarm systems. The third category is public facilities, including air conditioning monitoring, energy management, and security monitoring for medium and large buildings, airports, docks, and subways.
SCADA systems can be widely used in the deployment and construction of production scheduling centers, energy control centers, remote maintenance centers, and enterprise data centers in industries such as oil fields, natural gas, water conservancy, energy management, municipal administration, tobacco, and coal mining.
The following social and economic benefits have been achieved after implementing a SCADA system:
This greatly improves the safety and reliability of production and operation management;
Automation of production formula management can greatly improve product quality and production efficiency;
This greatly reduces the possibility of production personnel facing harsh working environments and ensures the safety of personnel as the top priority during the work process;
This can greatly reduce unnecessary waste of manpower;
Centralized control and management of the production process greatly enhances the competitiveness of the enterprise as a whole in terms of efficiency.
By retaining and processing equipment production trends, the system can improve the ability to predict emergencies. Its rapid response and handling capabilities in emergency situations can greatly reduce loss of life and property, thereby bringing potential social and economic benefits.
The ForceConSCADA system scheduling platform software V5.0 can monitor and manage the system through the SCADA system in the scheduling control center and regional control station, enabling unmanned operation of each process station.
The main functions are as follows:
Dispatch and Control Center
The main tasks of the dispatch control center are to collect and monitor data from the pipeline network through various station control systems or RTUs, and to perform tasks such as online simulation, operation planning, hazard identification and location, operation optimization, metering management, and simulation training. Operators at the dispatch control center use the information on pressure, temperature, flow rate, density, and equipment operating status of the pipeline system's process provided/displayed by the SCADA system operator workstation to operate and manage the entire system.
Its main functions are as follows:
Data acquisition and processing; dynamic display of process flow; alarm display, management, and event query and printing; real-time data acquisition, archiving, management, and trend chart display; historical data archiving, management, and trend chart display; generation and printing of production statistical reports; user information management; issuing scheduling and operation commands; hazard source location; system accident handling and issuing ESD commands; safety protection; determination of control permissions; clock synchronization of the entire system; SCADA system diagnostics; fault diagnosis and analysis of automatic control equipment and instruments; network monitoring and management; communication channel monitoring and management; switching between primary and backup channels when data communication channels fail; providing data for information systems; connecting and exchanging data with the enterprise automation management system platform; communicating with higher-level computer systems, etc.
Backup control center
To ensure real-time system operation scheduling and management in the event of unforeseen circumstances, and to maintain the functions of real-time data acquisition, processing, and storage, a backup control center is established to take over system control should the dispatch control center be unable to monitor the system for any reason.
Switching between primary and backup dispatch control centers
Under normal circumstances, each process station exchanges information with the main dispatch control center. The dispatch control center and the backup control center transmit data in real time via a DDN leased line (primary channel) and wireless communication (backup channel) on the public telecommunications network to ensure data synchronization. The backup control center continuously monitors and tracks the operational status of the dispatch control center. If an anomaly is detected in the dispatch control center, the backup control center of the gate station will immediately take over monitoring rights automatically or manually. Additionally, the dispatch control center can request the communication network management center to switch the communication between the SCS and RTU of each process station to the backup control center. After the dispatch control center returns to normal operation, it first completes data synchronization with the backup control center and then restores its monitoring rights over the pipeline network.
1.3 Market Analysis and Forecast
Because different application areas have different requirements for SCADA, the development of SCADA systems in different application areas is not entirely the same.
In key national projects such as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project and various rail transit SCADA systems, foreign products are the mainstay. In the early days of the municipal SCADA dispatching market, major integrators included Ankong, Tsinghua Unigroup, and Tsinghua Tongfang. The SCADA platform products they selected in project integration were mainly low-end configuration software. With the development of the integration of informatization and industrialization, higher requirements are being placed on large-scale SCADA dispatching software platforms.
In the upstream oil and gas pipeline sector, particularly the West-to-East Gas Pipeline and the Sichuan-to-East Gas Pipeline, SCADA equipment is mainly imported. Due to business expansion and management needs, major city gas companies are placing higher demands on SCADA platforms. According to publicly available data from China Control Engineering Network since 2007, the overall growth rate of China's SCADA market is estimated at 10-15%. Municipal and distribution network automation are likely to be the fastest-growing sectors for SCADA.
SCADA systems are the most widely used and technologically mature applications in the power system. Centered on RTUs and microprocessor-based protection devices, these systems integrate the control, signaling, measurement, and billing circuits of substations into a computer system, leading to large-scale application of substation automation in my country. Major suppliers in this field include NARI Group, Beijing Sifang, NARI Technology, and XJ Electric, whose products are specifically designed for the power sector. For 220kV and above dispatching systems, due to high technical barriers, only a few domestic suppliers, such as NARI Technology, NARI Relay Protection, Beijing Sifang, NARI Technology, and XJ Electric, can currently provide the corresponding products.
With the development of my country's national economy, urban rail transit has entered a period of rapid development. In 2015, my country had built nearly 3,000 kilometers of subway lines, and the total mileage is expected to reach 6,200 kilometers by 2020. Urban rail transit integrated monitoring systems, as a specific application of general SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in the urban rail transit industry, use a systematic approach to connect various dispersed automation systems into an organic whole. This enables information exchange and resource sharing among different professional systems in rail transit, and has also significantly boosted the SCADA integrated dispatching market.
High-end SCADA products based on the Windows platform from abroad mainly include Schneider Electric's Wonderware, GE's Proficy, and Honeywell's PKS system. Cross-platform high-end SCADA products from abroad mainly include Schneider Electric's Telvent and Siemens' PVSS. Domestically, general-purpose large-scale industrial SCADA platforms mainly include ForceControl Technology's eForceCon product series and Asia Control Technology's KingScada. Various international manufacturers have also launched integrated solutions to adapt to the requirements of next-generation dispatch and monitoring. Among domestic SCADA platform manufacturers, Beijing ForceControl Technology has gradually launched solutions based on a unified architecture platform. Related products have been widely used in urban gas, oil and gas fields, municipal engineering, and water conservancy. With the continuous improvement of the unified architecture, these products are gradually being extended to large-scale distributed SCADA systems.
The typical lifespan of industrial automation products is around five years. SCADA scheduling platform software, as an industrial IT component, is subject to Moore's Law in the IT industry, resulting in higher requirements for upgrades and maintenance, leading to frequent product version iterations. A key characteristic of SCADA scheduling platform software is that stability is its primary objective, and it tends to lag behind other industries in adopting new technologies. The economic lifespan of a SCADA scheduling system is highly dependent on the operating system. If the operating system remains largely unchanged, the product's lifespan can be extended through upgrades and replacements as technology continues to advance, resulting in a considerably long economic lifespan.
1.4 New Generation Automation Software Platform
With the deep integration of informatization and industrialization, the construction of smart factories and smart cities has accelerated. Large-scale smart industrial enterprises and smart city parks need to leap from digitalization to intelligence, using cloud computing platforms to move from information sharing to the high-level sharing and inheritance of knowledge and business, breaking down departmental barriers and achieving a performance-oriented development model. Intelligent control systems based on distributed real-time historical databases are the driving force and engine for building integrated production command systems in smart factories. Driven by the business needs of integrated intelligent control in enterprises, industrial automation software systems are developing towards intelligence, distribution, integration, networking, platformization, and comprehensive management.
A unified architecture platform adapted to the deep integration of informatization and industrialization requires top-down abstraction of data and business models across all aspects, including data acquisition, data storage, data transmission and application, data security, and network security. ForceCon, a product family from ForceControl Technology, uses a distributed real-time database as its core to build the ForceControl family's "Industrial Control Message Bus," and supports the integration of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) system architecture's "Information Service Bus." The message bus and service bus provide reliable and universal information interaction mechanisms and wide-area service mechanisms, enabling secure and efficient data communication and application integration across the entire system. Spanning the entire enterprise information business, it allows for the free construction of applications of varying scales, achieving integration from underlying industrial field control (small-scale station systems, embedded HMIs) to production scheduling and command management (SCADA) and upper-level information management (MES, ERP). It can also fully embrace the scalability brought by virtualization and cloud computing, creating hybrid solutions to push data to the cloud while ensuring its integrity, thus promoting enterprise information integration.
ForceControl Technology's unified architecture platform-based SCADA scheduling system features a flexible system architecture. Using a distributed real-time database as the message bus, it allows for the free construction of applications of varying scales, from single-user systems to large-scale systems with hybrid applications such as server/client, web, and redundancy. The system architecture can be freely designed by the user. The software is highly scalable, allowing for easy addition of client machines without affecting the normal operation of existing systems.
ForceControl Technology's unified architecture platform-based SCADA scheduling system is centered on a distributed regional real-time database. This distributed real-time database technology ensures accurate output and visualization of production data, while the database's infinitely hierarchical structure allows large enterprises to access comprehensive information. ForceControl's SCADA system scheduling platform software features a flexible system application architecture, enabling the free construction of applications of varying scales to meet diverse enterprise information requirements. Users can flexibly build solutions tailored to their specific enterprise needs based on this architecture.
ForceControl Technology's unified architecture platform-based SCADA scheduling system supports an independent historical archive database, enabling the archiving of massive amounts of historical data for easy historical data retrieval. It features a distributed data source management mode, and the SCADA platform software's visual human-machine interface requires no programming; it can directly interact with remote databases through remote data source configuration, completing various functions such as production monitoring, querying, and curve analysis.
With simple configuration, web servers can publish production data over the network, enabling real-time monitoring of the production process from anywhere, thus meeting the needs of enterprises for the integration of informatization and industrialization.
