Understanding industrial control systems
Industrial control systems have existed since the third industrial revolution, enabling rapid mass production of goods assisted by computer interfaces. They consist of the hardware and software responsible for real-time operations at the machine level. The PLC, Remote Terminal Unit (RTU), and Embedded Controllers are the first stage of control within the manufacturing environment.
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) generally sits one layer above to supervise and control a network of PLCs and other devices. Distributed Control Systems (DCSs) combine PLC and SCADA in a process-oriented manufacturing setup. For the scope of this book, we will be doing a deep dive into PLCs while giving a limited overview of the other high-level manufacturing systems, except to discuss where we might gather data from some of these systems.
Figure 5.2 – Industrial control systems overview
PLCs, SCADA systems...
