Big Scada?

[jazzplayermark]

I'm looking for opinions here.  I am looking at replacing an existing data acquisition system and I'm looking at Advanced HMI as an option. I am interested in it because of the ability to connect to sql and also because of this great forum!

So the current system has about 30 forms, about 1500 data points acquired from 16 different locations via modbus.  Much of the data is shared between forms and there are additionally about 50 or so calculated  data points. The average number of data points per form will average around 20 or so with the largest having around 40.

My question really is whether Advanced HMI can handle this load.  The conversion will be very labor intensive which my customer is fine with; I just don't want to get near the end and find out that it's not going to work. I have very little experience with this product so I don't have enough real world experience with it to have an opinion of my own.

Any comments/ideas will be greatly appreciated.

[Archie]

Is this ModbusTCP (Ethernet)? What will be the expected update/sample rate for the points?

[jazzplayermark]

Yes it is modbus TCP. Most of the network is fiber. The current system experiences delays in the range of 5-10 seconds and is sometimes even slower.

I think they would be happy to have 2-3 seconds delay on updates and maybe 5 seconds when opening a new form.

[Archie]

There are many factors that determine how fast data can be acquired, such as whether the data is in consecutive registers. In the ideal situation, if you read 100 consecutive registers from 16 different devices, I would estimate refresh rates with AdvancedHMI to be about 1 second.

If it is a question of whether AdvancedHMI can handle that much data, then the answer is an absolute yes.

When comparing AdvancedHMI to other SCADA packages such as WonderWare, I think in every case, you will find AdvancedHMI to be faster simply because it is a compiled application and not an interpreted one. However the trade off in many cases is typically the need to write more code to do tasks that may be canned in other packages. So when using AdvancedHMI as a SCADA, a decent knowledge of writing VB is important.

[jazzplayermark]

I will work on a couple of forms as a test. I think it is worth the extra coding for a better product.  Thanks for your insight.

[timryder]

I agree that the potential power of AHMI is just incredible. In my small experiences so far however the thing I'm struggling with is the undocumented limitations.  They can all be overcome however and the benefit far outweighs the hassle. I would recommend it for sure.