Municipal Utility Monitoring
Cogent DataHub™ Use Case
A European municipal utility company had developed a custom program for analyzing data from their SCADA system. They wanted this analytics program to run in their administration building, while the SCADA system had to remain on site, behind a closed firewall.
The utility company asked a systems integrator company to help them make the connection and the integrator decided to use DataHub software. They installed one DataHub instance on the computer running the SCADA system, and used OPC to gather the data. They then installed another DataHub instance on the admin building computer, and used a DataHub API to connect it to the analytics program. The two locations were connected using DataHub tunnelling. The result is that the data flows from the SCADA system to the analytics program, and the results of the analysis are then returned back to the SCADA system, all in real time. Latency across the network is on the order of milliseconds, so for all practical purposes, the analytics program appears to be running within the SCADA system itself.
After seeing the whole system working effectively for some time, the customer then asked if the DataHub program could be used to improve on the data logging capabilities of the original analytics program. Using the Database Write feature, the system integrator was able to improve the logging of real-time data to the analytics database.
