ABSTRACT
Typical industrial control and automation systems for process and manufacturing industries perform a variety of tasks in parallel, such as reading sensor data, computing control algorithms producing outputs to regulate process parameters and updating display and transferring process data to the enterprise information systems. The top network level of an industrial control and automation system is the information level which gathers management information from the control level and manages all the plant automation functions. The International Electrotechnical Commission 61499 standard introduces a series of modeling notations consisting of the function block, the application, the resource, the device and the system. A device is a self-contained hardware item containing a processor, memory and communication interfaces. The chapter presents the commonly used supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) applications Modbus communication protocol. Typical operation of a SCADA system is to parameterize remote devices, collect data for human and machine interface diagrams and handle the central communication system.
