Bridging SCADA systems and GI systems

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems are omnipresent in production operation worldwide. Failure detection within these systems remains a challenging task as the level of granularity in terms of location-based identification is low. The systems are able to identify and display failing components, but the situation becomes even more severe in case one of the failing components is not an electronic component but a structural component with a spatial extent such as a pipeline system. In consequence, the process of detection and repair of such components remains a time-consuming and cost-intensive task. To provide a generic solution for this kind of issues, the authors present a conceptualization and a software adapter bridging a SCADA system and a Geographic Information System (GIS). The authors employ international standards from both domains to enable an information exchange between these systems. The resulting autonomous software adapter and the corresponding prototypical implementation thus extends SCADA systems with GIS capabilities.