About this event

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems are being widely deployed in a lot of industries such as manufacturing plants, water treatment plants, processing industries, power substations, integrated city management systems, advanced traffic management systems and integrated rail and transport systems.

SCADA is a tool to improve operational and management efficiency. SCADA generates a lot of excitement - the idea of monitoring, controlling and managing entire operations of a large plant or system from the desktop by merely looking at colourful pictures of the operations is like playing your favourite video game. After the initial excitement comes the boredom of looking at the same graphics day-after-day. Then the red dots start flashing on the screen…soon many more red dots appear. For the engineer, this becomes a nightmare as they rush to fix the red dots. For the customer, suddenly nobody is working on improving the plant processes because everyone is too busy fixing the SCADA. This is unfortunately a real-life scenario in a lot of SCADA installations in Malaysia.

With the advent of information technology, SCADA is moving from the engineering domain more towards the information technology domain, and this not only creates opportunities but also creates huge challenges to the engineering community and the end customers deploying SCADA.

The talk will introduce the basic concepts of SCADA and the related automation systems and infrastructure necessary to deploy SCADA. It will introduce some real-life examples of SCADA applications, and will discuss the challenges faced by local companies in deploying SCADA and automation systems.

The talk will also discuss the merits of designing and deploying home-grown SCADA vs buying off-the-shelf SCADA solutions, and the opportunities available to local engineers wanting to build and deploy local SCADA and automation solution.

About the speaker

The speaker - T. Linganathan - graduated from the Loughborough University of Technology, United Kingdom in 1980 with a BSc (Hons) degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Mr Linganathan is a Chartered Engineer and has been a member of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) since 1980. He has 27 years of working experience designing and developing local solutions in the test instrumentation, production equipment, automation and SCADA areas.

Mr Linganathan is the General Manager of Mahkota Research Sdn Bhd, which manufactures and deploys the locally developed SCADA solutions called MOMS (Mahkota Operation Management System), and the Automation Controllers-C-88/Controllers, MC-88/PLC, MC-88/PAC, MC-88/RTU, MC-88/Telemetry, MC-88/Substation Controllers and MC-88/Dataloggers.