SCADA and Digital Twin

SCADA and Digital Twin

Keywords

• Digital twin is advanced analytical models for problem solving. SCADA mainly only for monitoring.
• SCADA is an image of the current status, whereas the digital twin depicts past, present and future. 
• Digital twin advanced analytical models for problem solving
• Digital twin is SCADA tools. One of the most important tools to be integrated in SCADA solutions for renewable energy are digital twins.
• Digital twin uses data to gain important insights into assets’ health and performance and so support decision making.
• Digital twin will help:
  • detecting key component behavior changes and trends
  • integrating machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies
  • applying visual analytic
  • analysis of performance and power curves

By observing a digital twin, you will gain an overview and a good understanding of how the actual system and its processes look and function in the physical world. For a digital twin to be a valuable asset it must be a detailed and accurate representation of the actual system installed.
It may sound similar to SCADA, but the digital twin offers a much more advanced level of information and perspective. SCADA is an image of the current status, whereas the digital twin depicts past, present and future.  An extremely valuable feature is that you can observe the digital twin using filters. You can observe the entirety of your sortation system while only focusing on capacity, temperature, power consumption, etc.

Much like SCADA emerged from the technological developments in communication networks and microprocessors, digital twinning emerged from the advancements in IoT and machine learning algorithms. Digital twinning is the logical progression of industrial automation after SCADA systems.

SCADA is a rule-based solution for supervisory control. The data acquired by a SCADA system can be used for explaining a fault after the fault occurs. However, SCADA cannot predict faults occurring and prevent them from happening or detect anomalies by design.

Benefits of DT in SCADA

• Reduce Unscheduled Downtime
• Model Development and Optimization
• Access to Large Scale Data