SCADA/HMI Systems in Advanced Educational Courses

This work gives a detailed description of some laboratory practices about SCADA/HMI systems developed for didactic purposes for various undergraduate courses at the 1st Engineering Faculty of Polytechnic of Bari, Department of Electrics and Electronics (Italy); they consider the use of National Instruments LabVIEWreg with the associated data logging and supervisory control toolset (DSCreg) to develop the SCADA/HMI portion (operator's interface and data logging) of a software simulated industrial plant consisting of a vessel with charge and discharge proportional valves, a heating/cooling element, a level sensor and two flow rate sensors. The control of this plant can be done in two different ways, according to the difficulty level of the practice: by way of a LabVIEW VI or by way of a ladder program written with RSLogix 5/500 and emulated by RSLogix Emulate 5/500 (both are Rockwell Software's products, the first being the ladder software development environment for PLC-5/SLC500 family of industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from Allen Bradley and the second being the related software emulator).