SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It is a general term for describing a complete industrial control system. SCADA systems are usually comprised of:

• Field Instrumentation
• I/O
• PLCs
• HMI Software

Joyful Thoughts

This section shares James Joy’s perspective on this technology as it applies to industrial automation. SCADA has been dominated by a collection of large vendors with proprietary platforms and ecosystems, such as Allen-Bradley and Siemens. The lack of open source community in industrial automation has prevented progress, with innovations prioritizing maximal profits instead of increased efficiency, maintainability, and scalablity.