Automated SCADA Functional Testing 1

"FAT"?

Keith Cress
kcress -

I would expect if there was a product specific to SCADA there would be a company that sold it or provided the service. It's probably equipment specific as most configuration is, limiting the chances of a generic solution. I tried Google. Maybe Bing! has better luck finding such a company.

I would think not. SCADA is really a Man - Machine interface. There is a visual component to testing a SCADA system. Unless you have a very high end (probably does not exist) machine vision system, it would be impossible to test.

Are you referring to your front end polling system, or field components?

If you are referring to the front end system, your best bet would be to hire a consulting company. They can review the programming and advise on CRM procedures adn compliance. A company like Enersys could help.

If you are talking field elements, like PLCs, there are several test programs that can be used to poll the devices for registers, send commands, etc. THe full blown Version of ModSCAN allows you to build a rutamentary HMI page to poll several tags from a RTU. I use this to test remote devices.

Factory Acceptance Test?

There is a fairly gigantic difference between factory acceptance test (FAT) and built-in test (BIT), particularly power-on BIT (PBIT). The former verifies that the unit under test (UUT) meets its functional/performance requirements, and is therefore more stringent than any after market testing needs to be, unless the UUT is being refurbished. The latter is what we would call a go/no-go test, i.e., is the UUT sufficiently operational that it can do the job that was intended. Typically, operating systems and operational software contain PBIT, as well as other types of BIT to do that task without requiring additional software or hardware.

Other BIT types include continuous BIT (CBIT) and initiated BIT (IBIT). CBIT monitors ongoing operations and hardware in the background, and may include things like checksums on calculations and data transfers, heartbeat monitoring on comm lines, etc. IBIT is used in maintenance when something has gone wrong and is initiated by an operator to determine whether a particular subassembly or module is malfunctioning. Generally, IBIT is more thorough that PBIT, but less thorough than FAT.

You might really be looking more for a PBIT functionality, that provides the operator some confidence that the system is reasonably operational and has a high probability of performing its intended function.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
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Depending on your budget there is a package called Eggplant that will run tests on your SCADA or any Windows software using image based macros and logic. I demo'd it years ago and it proved to be cumbersome to setup tests and too expensive for us. There is also a freeware opensource solution called sikuli. I didnt have much luck with it, and it doesn't appear to be an active project. Beware - the Eggplant folks were relentless on the sales calls once I downloaded a trial.