Process Modelling with Citect SCADA 2018
Citect SCADA is a great tool for providing a holistic, visual representation of what’s happening on the factory floor. Irrespective of factory size, it is equally applicable to small, medium and large organisations, from single standalone machines to entire factories.
Some of the best features of Citect (in my opinion) are:
Use of Genies to produce templates for common equipment
A large, comprehensive driver set supporting many PLCs, RTUs and devices.
Configurable redundancy with seamless failover (I haven’t had to test this in a live environment, but it does work well in the lab!)
Managed deployment of Citect projects through configuration of deployment servers and clients (a new feature added in Citect 2016). This also enables project versioning.
Equipment editor automatically generates tags based on equipment templates (or types). Dramatically reduces development time and supports standardisation.
I recently had the opportunity to visit a small brewery as part of another project I was working on and although they didn’t have any SCADA software implemented (or plans to do so), I took the opportunity to model part of their existing factory in Citect SCADA.
Built and tested in my workshop on an Allen Bradley Micro820 controller and using MODBUS for connectivity, the page below provides the ability to monitor factory operations from a central workstation.
When designing pages, the keep it simple approach is one that is always in the back of my mind. I like to present information in a clear, logical manner and only present what is necessary. Citect has the ability to include popup pages (super genies), or link to completely separate pages if more detailed information is required.
Setting up trend tags in Citect provides the ability to capture data for trending over time. For example, capturing energy utilisation, fermentation temperature vs set point temperature, heating and cooling cycles etc. Any tag can be trended without specifically setting it up as a trend tag, but data will be captured adhoc and therefore we lose the ability to capture data over time. You can learn a lot from trends and the ability to dynamically trend data in Citect provides some great insights.
If you need help with Citect, feel free to contact us.