Hello,

I have afew questions regarding scada. Please bear with me as I am very new to all of this. I am looking to find out what I would need to moniter production at my plant. Currently we use mainly Allen-Bradley SLC 500 and Mitsubishi FX-3U PLC's. I would like to be able to get the info from the machines and send it via ethernet to my pc in the office. From there I would like to be able to track in real time, production data, counter totals, etc.
Does anyone have any suggestions on a good scada program, and what I might need to communicate with it? I am not looking for the cheapest, I am looking for the most widely used and accepted scada software. We also are getting some bellhawk scanners to track production counts as cases are being made, so I would like to be able to use that data as well.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

plcdp

"Most widely used" is a bit of a quandry. I for one don't believe any of the sales statistics. I've had no less than 3 different vendors in my office over the last few weeks and ALL of them stated that they are the biggest, best, etc.

SCADA is a bit of a trick to define. Traditionally, SCADA systems talked to RTU's scattered over a very large geographic area such as a network of substations in a very large utility, or a large pipeline system. However, distributed HMI systems are now branded as "SCADA". Both do similar functions, but the traditional SCADA function mostly operated via GSM or modems or some other relatively slow communication mechanism to remote RTU's which are similar to an integrated operator panel + PLC.

Here are the major vendors of distributed HMI's (sounds like what you are talking about) that I'm aware of:
FactoryTalk View SE (Rockwell)
Wonderware. There are two versions, "System Platform", and "RT". The System Platform version is a true distributed HMI. The "RT" version is more or less a beefed up version of the traditional operator display operating on a PC with the capability for distributed distribution of copies of the screens as well as integration with a historian (data collector/logger). The "System Platform" version is more of a true distributed HMI.
Proficy iFix and Proficy Cimplicity PE. Both sold by GE Fanuc. iFix is better at integrating with ActiveX objects while Cimplicity is faster and lately, seems to be getting more of the development dollars.
Citect. Don't know much about it. Sold by a relatively small company in Australia but from my experience seems to be very popular there and at least at one time had a better feature set than the competitors when it came to distributed and scalable systems.
FactorySQL/FactoryPMI. One of the best of the Java-based systems. Uses ordinary SQL for the historian/database system. Between these two differences, it is wildly different to work with. Has a very different feature set from the others, mostly in a positive way. Lowest cost for a large installation.
Honeywell Experion HS. Honeywell basically lifted the HMI off their DCS system and sells it as a separate product now. Has lots of scalability issues as far as I can tell such as one server for every 5 clients maximum, limitations on points, limitations on trends, limitations on historian, etc.
InteractX. Made by CTC Parker. Interesting in that it's 100% based on an Adobe Flash architecture. Very easy to configure and integrates well with their operator panels (similar to Rockwell). Don't know much else about it.

Pluses and minuses for each one where I know a lot about them from previous experience:
FactoryTalk View SE. Doesn't contain a reporting package. You have to pay separately for historian, and then again for reporting. You pay license fees per screen (a strange curiosity) as well as per point and you pay again for every client, including software on each "manager" level machine (in addition to operators). No capacity for doing server-side scripting at all.
Wonderware System Platform. You pay for points, per operator station, and per manager station. The reporting and historian software is included. Can theoretically even do control and replace your PLC's but I don't trust it that much.
Proficy Cimplicity PE. You pay for points, per operator station, and for manager stations, you pay for a total number of "seats", making it a lot less expensive. The reporting and historian software is separately priced but you can get a free 100 point historian (which incidentally can work with any of the other systems).
FactorySQL/FacoryPMI. You pay a fixed fee for the server software. Clients, screens, and points are "free" (as in no additional charges). Reporting package is separate. HMI can be theoretically bought separately from the historian but it won't work very well.
Experion HS. Pay for each server. Servers can handle a maximum of 5 clients. Pay for every client, and pay per "point". Historian is very limited (fixed database sizes on everything).

For the money if you don't have an installed/developed base of anything, I'd go with FactoryPMI/FactorySQL. The server licenses are roughly similar in price to everyone else but once you pay for those, there's nothing else to buy. It works on a web-based distribution system which can run either web-based or (self-managed updates to) standalone clients. Very slick and inherits a lot of Java-based and SQL-based features. You also have "zero installation" for clients. Simply put out the web address and everyone in the plant can access the system. The screen builder takes a little getting used to if you come from one of the other HMI's because the Java-based background is very different from the others.

Hello,

>Currently we use mainly Allen-Bradley SLC 500 and Mitsubishi FX-3U PLC's.

PeakHMI can communicate with these devices.

Good luck,

Mark
http://www.peakhmi.com/

Also Citect has dedicated drivers for these PLC types.

Ooh - that ain't true - small company I mean. A variety of the Citect was sold under the AB banner. A version is also sold under the Schneider banner - Visio Citect I think. The 'small company' was bought by Schneider a couple of years ago and has just been 'inetgrated' into the Schneider monolith.
It comes with drivers for almost everything at no extra cost. Some PLC manufacturers have to sell you middleware. AB are one - depending on how you wish to communicate with the PLCs. Omron are another but Citect does come with Omron serial and Ethernet drivers that do not require the Omron middleware.
It is my favourite SCADA system.
You can download a trial version for free at www.citect.com. It will run quite happily for some time and then you have to restart it.
There is quite a strong Citect community that you can join if you buy the product.
Citect have a range of other products that may be of interest to you such as AMPLA etc. I think you can download all of them. It is also fully Vista compliant.
I have seven systems running on Vista Business now without any problems. You beauty!!! No more XP-Pro blue screen of death!!! Vista Business runs very well when you turn UAC off.
Hope this helps.

Thanks to all for the help, now that I am completely overwhelmed I will try to digest this and more than likely will have more questions to come.

Thanks again,

plcdp