By Doug Warren, Senior Vice President – HMI/SCADA Business Area, AVEVA
Today’s modern HMI (Human Machine Interfaces) and SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition) systems are rich with detail and visualization, supporting workers in improving operational effectiveness. However, the emergence of hybrid cloud architectures can now provide the security and deterministic control of a traditional on-premise solution and the mobility, advanced analytics and broader data sharing possibilities of the cloud.
You can’t control a plant from the cloud?
While the comment above is somewhat provocative and mostly inaccurate from a technical perspective, given cloud advancements over the past few years, there are still a number of practical issues that have prevented its broad-based industry adoption.
Many manufacturers and process industries consider their operating procedures and control systems as absolutely critical to their respective businesses and are not ready to add the cloud as a new variable to their hard-earned availability, throughput and efficiency gains. So why not leave it where it is, but securely stream the resultant data to a number of added value use cases?
Have you heard about AVEVA Operations Control?
User-centric AVEVA Operations Control software builds on traditional HMI/SCADA elements, while delivering new capabilities, as below:
Operational insights: To enhance operational agility, the visualization should be fully mobile – whether on the factory floor, in the control room, or in the field, without removing the ever-important context. The perspective should be tailored to the user’s role within the organization (i.e., specific personas). This all adds up to the right data, delivered to the right people, at the right time and is essential to critical decision support.
Collaboration: Fostering teamwork and ensuring operational continuity requires users to connect seamlessly with one another. This could involve chat, requesting Subject Matter Expert (SME) assistance, or doing simple handover tasks for the next shift –ll via the cloud for additional scalability and efficiency.
Advanced analytics: It’s no secret that data center providers are scrambling to keep up with the computing demand being created by generative AI and large language models. These technologies are now being applied in an industrial context, giving your operators and maintenance staff the ability to find insights and related design and troubleshooting information for their assets with a simple query to their industrial AI Assistant.
It is also possible to segregate internal or company sensitive data from any data that comes from the public domain yet combine it in the resultant textual output from the query. This presents a powerful productivity solution , which is also mindful of corporate intellectual property.
Other use cases use industrial AI leveraging streaming data from on-prem to predict different outcomes, like production quality, yield, throughput, energy efficiency and asset life are all things which every industrial company strives to improve. Now advanced analytics are available to do so in real-time and at scale (that is to say, not in a data science sandbox).
Coordination and learning: Addressing workforce challenges necessitates new approaches to knowledge retention and streamlined onboarding. AVEVA Operations Control can facilitate the distribution of documentation and drawings, digital logbooks, the creation of a digital repository for procedures and lessons learned, and user training and skill development—all without disrupting operations.
Data sharing opportunities: Once key data has been streamed to the cloud in support of any of the use cases mentioned above, it can be leveraged in ways previously not possible when it was trapped on the manufacturing floor. Think about the ability to transparently provide a single version of the truth in the form of common metrics across various manufacturing locations, or sharing key information to upstream or downstream value stream partners. Once securely in the cloud, this data can be used through a multitude of data sharing applications and services.
Vendor neutrality: Since operations typically rely on a multitude of hardware and software assets accumulated over years, it is crucial for a comprehensive operations solution to remain independent of specific vendors. This can either come in the form of support for various third-party devices through drivers and integrations, or through the use of Industry Standard protocols and tools such as OPC-UA or MQTT.
The latter approach can also provide the benefit of higher-level systems “discovering” the data and structures in a more automated (less prone to human error) way, as well as facilitate the concept of Unified Namespace which can ease enterprise data management hurdles(more on that another time).
Just as office software suites customize features like word processing, spreadsheets and email for individual users, a user-centric industrial software framework delivers tailored tools to meet each user’s specific requirements. We call this “a day in the life of operations” with AVEVA Operations Control, providing the software necessary to complete all of the normal tasks asked of operations staff on a typical working day.
A commercial model that is truly unlimited
To achieve optimal operational benefits, it’s necessary to collaborate with a technology provider that offers a subscription-based software model with seamlessly integrated packages and applications.
AVEVA Operations Control empowers end users to access the exact tools they require and provides the flexibility to acquire supplementary features as needed. At the same time, the subscription is based on the number of users, rather than the traditional method of counting tags, servers, or clients..
This approach offers immense architectural flexibility now and into the future – which is surely critical given the ever-increasing pace of technological change and digital transformation.
Taking HMI/SCADA to the next level
What’s clear is that new technologies and innovative ways of consuming them have advanced the world of HMI/SCADA to a whole new level of operational support and management.
The implementation of digital control and monitoring technologies across a hybrid model allows businesses to take employee support, collaboration and scalability to the next level without compromising plant availability or security.
Organizations should seek out an industrial software supplier that offers a complete HMI/SCADA solution, but is also able to support enhanced analytics, collaboration, and learning across the entire enterprise.
