SCADA/HMI systems in advanced educational courses

This paper gives a detailed description of some laboratory practices about Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA)/Human to Machine Interface (HMI) systems developed for didactic purposes for various undergraduate courses at 1st Engineering Faculty of Polytechnic of Bari, Department of Electrics and Electronics, Italy. They consider the use of National Instruments’ LabVIEWTM with the associated Datalogging and Supervisory Control Toolset (DSC) to develop the SCADA/HMI section (operator’s interface and datalogging) 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 Virtual Instrument (VI, the common name identifying LabVIEW programs) or by way of a ladder program written with RSLogix 500 and emulated by RSLogix Emulate 500 (both are Rockwell Software’s products, the first being the ladder code development environment for SLC500 family of industrial programmable logic controllers (PLCs) from Allen Bradley and the second being the related software emulator).