Flexible manufacturing cell SCADA system for educational purposes

This article deals with the development of a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition SCADA system to be used in a flexible manufacturing cell for educational purposes in different automation engineering fields (SCADA development, PLC programming and industrial communications). When dealing with industrial communications or PLC programming the SCADA is employed as a supervision tool. In the other hand, when teaching SCADA systems the application will be developed by the students and the SCADA presented in this article is employed as a model. The application communicates through Internet with four controllers, by means of an OPC server, visualizes comprehensive information about the elements of the cell, includes the video streaming of an IP camera, and features traceability and report generation capabilities. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 16: 21–30, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com); DOI 10.1002/cae.20115