Harald Mueller

SCADA Systems in the Cloud

SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems allow users to monitor (using sensors) and control (using actuators) an industrial system remotely. Larger SCADA systems can support several 100,000 sensors, sending and storing hundreds of thousands of messages per second, generating large amounts of data. As these systems are critical to industrial processes, they are often run on highly reliable and dedicated hardware. This is in contrast to the current state of computing, which is moving from running applications on internally hosted servers to cheaper, internal or external cloud environments. Clouds can benefit SCADA users by providing the storage and processing power to analyse the collected data. The goal of this chapter is twofold; provide an introduction to techniques for migrating SCADA to clouds, and devise a conceptual system which supports the process of migrating a SCADA application to a cloud resource while fulfilling key SCADA requirements (such as; support for big data storage).

Seamless Computing for Industrial Systems Spanning Cloud and Edge

Industrial systems are more and more dominated by software. In addition, this software is present across several compute domains, from decentralized edge to centralized datacenters and clouds. While the productivity of application lifecycle management has tremendously improved in the area of cloud computing, there is no homogeneous and seamless environment to build, deploy and operate the software across these domains. This leads to a separation, inefficient processes, and duplicate efforts to provide software that runs across the different layers. This paper introduces the concept of seamless computing, which provides a seamless computing environment for multi-domain applications, supporting the mobility of workloads between cloud and edge. The approach is based on transferring established, de-facto standard cloud computing technologies to resource-constrained compute environments in the edge. After defining high-level requirements for seamless computing, a functional reference model is derived, and existing cloud technologies are discussed and selected according to their related capabilities.

Migration of a SCADA system to IaaS clouds --- a case study

SCADA systems allow users to monitor and/or control physical devices, processes, and events remotely and in real-time. As these systems are critical to industrial processes, they are often run on highly reliable and dedicated hardware. Moving these SCADA systems to an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud allows for: cheaper deployments, system redundancy support, and increased uptime. The goal of this work was to present the results of our experimental study of moving/migrating a selected SCADA system to a cloud environment and present major lessons learned. To this end, EclipseSCADA was deployed to the NeCTAR research cloud using the “lift and shift” approach. Performance metrics of a unique nature and large scale of experimentation were collected from the deployed EclipseSCADA system under different loads to examine the effects cloud resources and public networks have on SCADA behavior.

Poster Abstract: Continuous Computing from Cloud to Edge

Industrial systems are more and more dominated by software. In addition, this software is present across several compute domains, from decentralized edge to centralized datacenters and clouds. While the productivity of application lifecycle management has tremendously improved in the area of cloud computing, there is no homogeneous and seamless environment to build, deploy and operate software across these domains. This leads to separation, inefficient processes, and duplicate efforts to provide software running across different layers. This poster introduces the concept of Continuous Computing, which provides a seamless computing environment for multi-domain applications, supporting the mobility of workloads across compute domains, from cloud to edge. The chosen top down approach is based on transferring established, de-facto standard cloud computing technologies to the resource-constrained compute environments in the edge. The objective is to support multi-domain applications by enabling workload mobility, i.e. the ability to locate and relocate application components within and across compute domains. We present a functional reference model for Continuous Computing and validate existing cloud technologies with respect to the match of their capabilities.

Benchmarking Cloud-Based SCADA System

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) is a typical OT (Operational Technology) system that uses computers, networked data communications and graphical user interface for process supervisory management. SCADA systems are managing industrial processes or mission-critical infrastructure, and most installations are not making use of cloud-based infrastructure. In this paper, we present different scenarios for cloud-based SCADA and a framework for performance evaluation. Based on measurement results in different scenarios, we identify critical design issues, give recommendations how to address them, and demonstrate the general feasibility of cloud-based SCADA systems.