SCADA (short for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) is a general term for describing a complete industrial control system. It enables operators to monitor, control, and automate processes across a plant, facility, or distributed network.

SCADA systems typically include:

• Field Instrumentation
• I/O (Input/Output) Modules
• PLCs
• HMI Software

Joyful Thoughts

This section shares James Joy’s perspective on how this technology applies to industrial automation.

SCADA has long been dominated by large vendors with closed, proprietary ecosystems — such as Allen-Bradley and Siemens. This lack of openness has slowed innovation, favoring profit over progress and limiting opportunities for shared advancement.

Meanwhile, web technology has already tackled many of the same challenges we face in automation:

• How do we orchestrate workloads automatically?
• How do we ensure logic runs as expected?
• How do we achieve reliable redundancy?
• How do we deliver an excellent operator (user) experience?

The key difference is that web technology thrives on open source collaboration, while industrial automation has historically relied on proprietary control.

To accelerate SCADA’s evolution, we should adopt proven web technologies to address our shared challenges as well as those that are unique to industry, such as diagnosing production logic in real time. We can build solutions that integrate seamlessly with the modern, open systems we’ve embraced.