Development of Navigation system for rail-way network using GPS and SCADA, while utilizing MPC

Investigate and recommend how to resolve issues faced by systems that need to duplicate elements for redundancy (e.g. field I/O, communication channels, intermediate data concentrators, front end processors, master stations and historians). Also consider alternative high-availability strategies. Consider the characteristics of report by exception protocols, verification of data transfer, asymmetric communication paths, etc. It sounds mundane until you look at the detail and realize how complex it is.

Hello Andrew West ,

Can you recommend any books or standards that expand upon your answer?

Regards,

Tom Cuff

Simply: No. That's part of the problem. There are multiple different requirements and implementations for different industries and purposes that all get lumped under the banner "SCADA". They have different ways of doing things. Some equipment vendors discuss this sort of thing as part of product manuals, but typically in a very narrow way of "how to do exactly this one thing with exactly this one product". It takes a lot of reading and thinking to understand where things will work together and where they won't.

In a similar way, there are not many "SCADA" courses or text books and those that exist tend to have a particular viewpoint (e.g. factory automation or wide-spread utilities like power or water). This focus in different areas can lead to a quite different content. I haven't seen anything that attempts to address the wide range of things that get called SCADA and explain how they differ.

I attended a conference last week where a product vendor was explaining how they had implemented a redundant system. It simply could not work they way it was described. Hence I'm pretty sure they didn't do what they said they did, but it may have been too complicated to explain. I suspect they kept a simple diagram that looked good, but the story was contradictory if you know how some of the individual parts work.

If nothing else, this is complicated (meaning lots of simple, but interacting things happen, not "complex" meaning that it is difficult to model or analyze what is actually happening). That might make it a fruitful ground for research by identifying the factors that interact or need to be considered and how they impact the choices that need to be made.

There is an IEC technical report in development (but probably not due for completion for another 12-18 months) that talks about some of the issues that should be considered in the power system automation space when using redundant devices. This is planned to be published as IEC 61850-90-20 "Guideline to redundancy systems". This report probably won't tell you what to do, but it will identify a range of things that should be considered and offer some suggestions.