Gathering the Information. ABB MicroSCADA

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4.2 Gathering the Information

The data in MicroSCADA can normally be viewed only in MicroSCADA itself.

But the data can be accessed by using SCIL programming language or by using an interface, like ODBC or OPC to access data in MicroSCADA with another program. SCIL is a programming language especially designed for the application engineering of the SYS 600 supervisory control system. Each MicroSCADA application has a process database for handling process supervision and a report database for calculations, automatic activation and data storage. These databases are composed of application objects. SCIL programming can be used to control the entire system, not only controlling the objects, but also defining the system configuration and communication. With SCIL it is possible to read attributes in the system objects and for example create a text report using these attributes. /10/

The MicroSCADA product support team located in Vaasa has made a program that gathers all the data from MicroSCADA and the operating system as well, in to a compressed zip file. The file is meant to be sent by an operator to the product support team, in case the system or MicroSCADA is having some problems. With the information that the file contains, the product support team can examine what programs are installed in the operating system, memory usage of the programs running at the time and MicroSCADA application configurations. In fact the data gathering program is included in all new MicroSCADA Pro versions. It is located in MicroSCADA Control Panel under the admin menu. There you can push the

Support-button which opens a wizard that creates the system info log file.

In order to be able to run the System Info Logging tool automatically, some changes have to be made to it. The standard program starts a wizard that requires a few mouse clicks from the user and it is not possible to add any additional information to the zip file. The program is an executable file, which cannot be modified without the source code. The developers of the System Info Logging tool were very helpful and made a custom version of the program for this thesis.

This new executable file does not require any approvals or additional mouse click from the user. It can be placed in to /prog/exec/ folder of MicroSCADA.