About

OpenSCADA is platform which supports high fidelity emulation of IEC 61131-3 compliant PLCs and SCADA protocols. It can be used to build and simulate complex environments involving cyber-physical systems. OpenSCADA PLCs can be run inside network emulators like CORE/Mininet and interact with other emulated processes. OpenSCADA also provides python interfaces to link the network emulation with a physical system simulator. Using these interfaces OpenSCADA PLCs can interact with physical system simulators like Matpower, Simulink, ManPy etc. OpenSCADA also ships with support for virtual time based control which is handled by Kronos. This allows tight time-synchronization between the physical system simulation and OpenSCADA network emulation.

Motivation

As manufacturing systems and smart grid networks become increasingly networked with intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) and PLCs, it becomes necessary to understand how these devices interact with the physical system. Several scenarios need to be simulated to analyse the control system and study how changes to cyber components affect the physical environment. OpenSADA enables protoyping high fidelity SCADA emulation scenarios in a safe virtualized environment.

OpenSCADA implements a generic Instruction List processing backend which can be used to emulate different classes of PLCs. It allows users to specify a hardware spec of the PLC they want to emulate which includes the number of CPUs in the PLC, its RAM, Input and Output memory size and execution time of each supported instruction. Users can then leverage OpenSCADA to write Instruction List PLC programs which are interpreted and executed by a backend engine implemented in C++. With this feature, users can emulate acurately, the functionality and timing behaviour of vendor specific PLCs like Siemens, ModiCon, SEL etc. OpenSCADA also proves a generic interface to interact with these soft-PLCs. Emulations of sensors and actuators can talk to the PLC using this generic interface and specific SCADA protocols can be implemented to use the interface to exchange data with the PLC.

We envision that users can leverage this high fidelity emulation platform for various tasks like:
  • Building performance models of PLC programs, e.g to study how changes to the program would impact its timing and subsequently the underlying physical system
  • Understand how changes to the cyber network affects the control system, e.g how does adding a layer of encryption impact the system
  • Load-test the cyber-physical system under various scenarios to improve coverage
  • Perform what-if cost analysis, e.g what would be the impact of replacing one PLC with another for a particular task, or, what is the best/cheapest PLC to buy to execute a specifc program etc.

The possibilities are huge and we welcome further contributions to improve the project!