Master Control V4 SCADA
Master Control (MC) is a fully featured SCADA solution specifically designed for the energy & utilities sector. Master Control, with its inherent high availability architecture and full support for widely distributed networks, is ideally suited for effective management and control of large / complex power, water, gas, telecommunications and transport networks.
Typical Master Control systems will monitor and control utility networks that cover tens of thousands of square kilometers and service many millions of customers. These systems monitor and control billions of dollars worth of assets and are critical to the operation of the end-users’ core businesses. Master Control utilises the Logica-developed, real-time MOSAIC database, which has been designed to be particularly efficient in the high-speed distribution of real time data across geographically dispersed networks.
The MOSAIC database appears to users as an object-oriented database in that it can model real-world equipment and devices that are understood by the customer, yet it behaves as a relational database with respect to other applications. It readily supports additional functionality and third party applications. This is in contrast to many older legacy SCADA systems which have a 'flat' or point-oriented database that only supported a predefined equipment model or no model at all.
The Master Control system is fully distributed and extremely scaleable with the ability to share the load of data processing across any number of servers. The system can be expanded at any time and without re-architecting by simply adding additional hardware. The cost of discrete hardware is kept to a minimum by the concept of N-node redundancy. Each node in the system is capable of retaining a fully or partially synchronised copy of the real time database and hence should one node fail, the services on that node will be shared amongst the remaining nodes. There is no concept of,and therefore no constraint, imposed by a main / backup (or duty / standby) configuration since all nodes have active copies of the database.
The support offered by Master Control for a fully replicated real-time database gives great operational flexibility. Typical Master Control systems operate from one (or more) Central Control rooms with a Disaster Recovery control room at a separate site. After hours monitoring can be carried out from a separate site or can be fully automated with after hours control being performed by remote access as required.
Master Control is an open system, which supports a wide range of telemetry drivers for data collection and provides access to real time and historic data through standard interfaces, such as ODBC. A rich fully featured published API is also provided giving full access to current (real-time) data, historic data and event history.
Master Control's modular architecture allows popular industry and / or project specific applications to be easily built on, and fully integrated into, the core Master Control product. Typical applications include; disturbance logging, load management, systemic control, SMS / alphanumeric pager, equipment tagging, operator diary, etc.
Hardware and Operating Systems
Master Control's core applications can be hosted on standard 'off the shelf' Unix, Linux or Windows-based servers and the Operator Workstations can be hosted on ‘off the shelf’ Linux or Windows based PCs. Master Control client sessions can also be hosted on standard operating PCs without the need for proprietary software. Commercial off the shelf (COTS) software is used to provide fully functional remote access via LAN, WAN, VPN or dial-up connections.
User Interface
The Master Control User interface has a familiar MS Windows 'look and feel' with standard icons, drop-down menus and ‘point and click’ functionality for navigating between displays. Standard filtering and sorting facilities are provided on all displays, as are full-colour graphics that support pan, zoom, and auto-sizing. The Master Control user interface supports standard 'cut and paste' functionality as well as data export to a variety of file formats such as HTML and CSV. Alarm displays, event displays, trend and tabular displays are some of the standard displays provided with Master Control V4. Custom graphical displays can also be built using a symbol-based drawing editor.
Alarms and Events
A comprehensive alarm and event processor is provided that supports 1ms time-stamping. An unlimited number of alarm conditions can be specified which can include fixed alarm limits (e.g. High, Low), alarm profiles that track a profile based on the time of day, and seasonal profiles that change based on the date. Alarms are assigned priorities and are displayed in a different colour depending on priority. Master Control supports delayed alarms, alarm inhibit and alarm suppression. By using a single mouse click from an alarm, a user can navigate to the relevant graphical display, the point details display, bring up a trend for that point or acknowledge the alarm.
User Authority
Using user specific logins Master Control assigns a role to each user. Each role has specified rights that allow the user access to perform specified functions on certain Areas of Interest. For example, an Operator may have full view and control rights to an asset that is within his operating area but may only have view-only access to neighbouring operating areas.
Data Historian
The Master Control data historian stores raw data using sophisticated compression algorithms to minimise disk space. The file structure utilised permits unlimited historical data to be available on-line. (In practice the amount of history stored is limited only by available disk space.) Typical Master Control systems store many years’ data on-line and with some existing systems up to 25 years historic data is available on-line. Algorithms are provided to perform functions such as minimum, maximum, averaging and integration (cumulative) on the raw data.
A 'journaling' facility is provided to allow historical data to be copied to a number of on-line history nodes. This allows fast access to historical data (without having to retrieve data across a WAN), backup of the data (through duplication) and also allows archiving at a central point for all historical data.
Configuration
Customised graphical displays can be drawn in the intuitive, native, Master Control graphical editor or can be imported from AutoCAD, Visio or a range of GIS products. A symbol editor allows the creation and editing of standard symbols. Any changes made to the standard symbol are automatically reflected in all displays that use that symbol. Master Control provides an editing environment that allows users to check displays out for modification and place them in an off-line editing environment so that the 'production' version of the displays are not impacted upon during editing. A full audit trail is provided for display editing.
Database changes can be made on-line, with the appropriate authority, and are distributed in real time throughout the system. Bulk changes are typically made off line using the Master Control database query language (DQL), or utilising specifically designed MS Excel spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are designed to allow easy entry of data, whilst enforcing the relational data integrity rules of the MOSAIC database. Additional data integrity checks are also performed before the data is loaded into the MOSAIC database. A full audit trail is provided for all on-line database changes.
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