Federative SCADA-Solution for Evolving Critical Systems

Abstract

This article intends to introduce the concept of federative SCADA systems in order to fulfill the requirements of evolving critical systems. The SCADA Federation is a cooperative system which ensures more than the individual assigned functions of each entity, but also provides some envelope functions created by the mechanism implemented into each federative SCADA systems member. It defines the structure, the conceptual model of the federation, the set of rules imposed to the federation members, the global tasks of the federation, the envelope functions and the offered services, preserving in the meantime all the individual systems functionally which are improved by integration synergy. The federation assures the management support of interconnected individual critical systems, using different technologies and methods to enable the participation of existing stand-alone SCADA systems to the federation, in order to provide an added value, the interoperability of the resulted enhanced-system. The concept may be prospectively exploited in order to carry out the integration among several evolving critical SCADA systems. To all types of critical systems: safety critical, mission critical, business critical and security critical, the federative SCADA systems offer a support to decrease their level of criticality. The topic of coordination and interoperability involves system of systems (SoS) approaches.