SCADASupervisory Control and Data Acquisition

It’s what the operator sees in the control room: plant mimics, live values, alarms and trend charts. It keeps a history of the signals and records who did what. It is used in factories, water treatment plants, water and power networks, and solar plants.

Its job is the installation’s present, not management. So it tends to fall short on business questions—how much each order produced, which stop cost the most this month—and is complemented by an MES or by custom tools that read its data. Because it is a control system, any connection to it is made with care: reading through an authorized channel, and never writing from outside without a reason and a review.