Hi, I'm fairly new to setting up a system with VTScada, I'm using VTS 12 Lite to monitor and control small monitoring stations. The monitoring stations have the ability to detect a communications failure and save data locally. Is it possible to have this data uploaded into VTS automatically for display in the HDV?

I have seen this done before however, the situation was that there were proprietary communications protocol from the field devices to an intermediary software application running on a PC which would then pass the data to VTS via TCP connection. I'm not certain exactly how this worked, I wasn't privy to such detail. They used .log database files, I'm not convinced it was VTS database, although this was running VTS 6 and VTS 8.

I'm wondering if the best way to do this is to build a small software package that sits between my devices and VTS that automatically logs all 'historic' data that is generated say once every 5 minutes to a custom database and VTS can display the data from here in the HDV whilst all 'live' data is sent to VTS for display at a much higher update rate.

Does this sound feasible? If so is there anyone that has any experience of this? And does anyone have any suggestions for how this might be tackled?

I know its best to work at keeping the communications link live but this system requires a level of backup. I have some flexibility and can adjust the way that the data is outputted from the field devices.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hey Sparky

This feature is built into the DNP3 protocol and I believe that it is also supported by ScadaPack RTU's. If possible I'd suggest you check to see if DNP3 is an option in your case. Another option is to place a VTScada server at the local site and to set up redundancy between the sites.

There are certainly a number of more complex ways to do this however if one if the above options are possible, I'd suggest you go with one of those.

As Dave said, DNP3 is an option here, but I'm not a fan of that protocol.

One option is to put a local VTScada node connected right to the network of the PLC. You can then configure the historian and tag IO in a distributed way such that as long as the connection to the PLC remains up from either the local VTScada node or the remove server, you will be storing historical data.