Scores of industrial supervisory control systems are available in the market, offering highly sophisticated features for keeping facilities under close scrutiny. However, when users want to notify alarms to operators, they are either faced with a dead end or required to make do with a simple email or text message.

In an effort to fulfil an increasingly complex set of needs, we have developed several dedicated connectors for the main SCADA solutions to simplify the process of interconnecting systems. ALERT acts as an extension to the SCADA system by adding leading-edge features for notifying alarms and managing on-call teams.

However, if the legacy SCADA system does not have its own connector, ALERT can also retrieve information from the system by OPC, DDE and many other channels (SQL database, text files, incoming emails, incoming SMS messages, etc.).

Similarly, users can bypass the SCADA system and retrieve information directly from the automated systems using standard automation protocols.

A dedicated connector presents the following main advantages:

• Simplified import of the database of existing alarms into the supervisory control systems with all their attributes (identifier, message, priority, group, etc.), thereby preventing users from having to re-enter the monitored data and associated parameters
• Dynamic creation of the alarms in the monitoring system with the option of creating processing filters
• Two-way transmission of alarm states between ALERT and the monitoring system (acknowledgement and masking of alarms)

SCADA systems and ALERT