MQTT SCADA Integration

The strength of technology in building, monitoring & controlling the machinery has become an imperishable part of the Industrial world and Industries have long adapted it. Compiling data & receiving commands in and out of the shop floor, around megalopolis and in energy & power plants have been in place for ages. However, Manufacturing industries are facing certain limitations with the traditional approach of controlling machinery because of the lack of ability to be inventive & adaptable. This is one of our IoT success stories of MQTT broker implementation. One of our customers from India has been building steam engineering and control instrumentation solutions that work for the process industry for over half a century. Their target is to provide solutions in Energy, Efficiency and Process Automation, using the finest technology the world has to offer. They use MQTT broker for modbus integration into SCADA systems to provide complete automation solutions for process Industry.

The challenge for granular Asset visibility

Far & wide, almost in every industry and in modern society, the supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system is used and on which the entire industrial operation is reliant. SCADA is an automation & operationalize control system which offers an intuition to the operators regarding the Industry operations. Almost in all the industrial sectors, SCADA has taken its place to pick up ingress to the complete plant from an authority room. It is a system of monitoring, gathering and processing real-time data locally or at remote locations that allows industries to control industrial processes. However, the way of facing ever-thriving compulsion from more firm regulations, cost volatility, hostile environmental conditions has forced manufacturing Industry to change. Process control & monitoring isn’t new in the industry, but the traditional SCADA systems can’t provide the granular asset visibility needed. And also, SCADA is still currently limited to the shop floor. Data taken from the industrial equipments are being viewed only inside the plant. Hence, progressive & enterprising companies have been increasingly embracing IoT technology to better manage their assets anytime, anywhere and prevent costly spills.

Turning Traditional Machines into superior smart systems

Global remote controlling, monitoring, simplicity in deployment, lower cost, rise in data precision are the necessities IoT affords for asset-heavy industries. Though IoT is quite the latest technology compared to SCADA & Programmable logic controllers PLC, its potentiality is certainly flexible to present-day industry demands. Nonetheless, when SCADA launch into, it authorized manufacturers network to operate cooperatively in real-time, in the same vein IoT is doing today. Therefore, it’s extremely evident that the power of SCADA systems and its technological abilities are pertinent in 4th Industrial revolution even today. However, the SCADA systems fall short in creating a truly connected ecosystem. Hence, fundamentally IoT should be considered as a technology that is deployed on top of SCADA architecture. This coordinated approach will make extensibility, data analytics, standardisation & interoperability a certainty. Intelligence / Informations initiated by SCADA systems make a move as one of the data sources of IoT. SCADA’s aim is on monitoring and controlling. Despite this, IoT is more concentrated on examining equipment data to boost up productivity and influence the business line. IoT is basically a pinnacle of breakthrough in the connectivity of hardware and data networks that SCADA provides. In short, IoT begins where SCADA ends.

Role of SCADA MQTT Broker integration in process Industry

As discussed above, our customer with its diverse industry experience and process knowledge can help to improve quality, consistency and accuracy of any process industry. It furnishes out-and-out turnkey solutions from design, detail engineering, drawing, documentation, supply, installation and commissioning of the effortless to most complex industrial processes. Since there were certain limitations in SCADA platform, they need an effective IoT framework which supports modbus protocol that can communicate between their devices & Industry’s SCADA system. That is as said earlier, IoT should be implemented at the top of SCADA. Hence, MQTT broker, a complete IoT application framework integrated to Modbus RTU (communicates in Modbus protocol) with which the data generated by their devices can be acessed simultaneously by SCADA system. MQTT Broker will let them push data from sensors to Modbus slave (RTU), from there SCADA will read & monitor the received data. This will help them provide a complete automation & control solutions to their industrial customers rather than providing a simple monitoring solution.

SCADA is all about the human machine interface (hmi) which permits humans to have remote access to a process. Whereas MQTT Broker is generally used as a machine-to-machine communication tool that ensures data is shared with both people and machine, rather than just people. In short, SCADA MQTT integration will makes sure that everyone and everything is kept in the loop at all times. As a result, The MQTT broker implementation addresses their need and provides them a complete solution. This is one of our IoT Success stories.