A FRAMEWORK FOR THE SPECIFICATION OF SCADA DATA LINKS

SCADA system overall performance is dependent on satisfactory performa nce of the integral data communication links. Therefore a specificatio n of the required data link performance is required as part of the sys tem specification. But what should the data link specification include ? The specification of data rate alone is shown here to be insufficien t to guarantee performance under all operating conditions. To determin e the additional attributes that must be specified the sensitivity of SCADA performance to the set Of data link attributes is analysed by co mputer simulation. From the results of the simulation a subset of sign ificant data link attributes is identified. This is the desired data l ink specification framework.