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Our offices are located in the Buffalo,
New York area, and we attempt to perform the bulk of the work here, close to home. However, most of us do travel to our clients' sites regularly
to provide some level of development on site. We typically do that anyway at the beginning of the project (during requirements definition, high
level design and any reviews) and at the end, when the integration task requires tight cooperation among all players. |
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ASG can design panels (and the control systems that go inside them) and usually have the panels manufactured by a local third-party panel builder. |
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We can program all common PLC types: Allen Bradley (Rockwell), Automation Direct, Siemens, GE, Schneider Electric (Modicon), Mitsubishi, National Instruments and many others. Most of our controls engineers have 20+ years experience and among the group, there are very few PLCs that ASG hasn't programmed. |
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A quote usually requires a meeting with a Sales engineer (our Sales staff is well-versed in engineering principles and has extensive SCADA experience) to gather the details, a review of the process to be monitored/controlled, a review of existing equipment (if any) and available electrical drawings, interviews with personnel to determine what they would like to accomplish, and any budgetary or other constraints. |
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We have worked on systems with hundreds of I/O points (thousands of tags) and systems as small as just a few I/O points. There is no typical application size, and ASG will provide a quote on virtually any sized system. |
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Our most common SCADA platforms are from GE (Proficy, formerly Intellution), Rockwell (Bizware) and Invensys (Wonderware). There are several
less-common and legacy SCADA platforms for which ASG has developed applications. |
SCADA is the abbreviation for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. It generally refers to an industrial control system: a computer system monitoring and controlling a process. The process can be industrial, infrastructure or facility based as described below: Industrial processes include those of manufacturing, production, power generation, fabrication and refining, and may run in continuous, batch, repetitive, or discrete modes. Infrastructure processes may be public or private, and include water treatment, distribution, wastewater collection and treatment, oil and gas pipelines, electrical power transmission and distribution, and large communication systems. Facility processes occur both in public facilities and private ones, including buildings, airports, ships, and space stations. They monitor and control HVAC, access, and energy consumption. A SCADA System usually consists of the following subsystems: A Human-Machine Interface or HMI is the apparatus which presents process data to a human operator, and through which the human operator monitors and controls the process. A supervisory (computer) system, gathering (acquiring) data on the process and sending commands (control) to the process Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) connecting to sensors in the process, converting sensor signals to digital data and sending digital data to the supervisory system. Communication infrastructure connecting the supervisory system to the Remote Terminal Units. There is, in several industries, considerable confusion over the differences between SCADA systems and Distributed Control Systems (DCS). Generally speaking, a SCADA system usually refers to a system that coordinates, but does not control processes in real time. The discussion on real-time control is muddied somewhat by newer telecommunications technology, enabling reliable, low latency, high speed communications over wide areas. Most differences between SCADA and DCS systems are culturally determined and can usually be ignored. As communication infrastructures with higher capacity become available, the difference between SCADA and DCS will fade (Wikipedia - 2008) |
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