Let’s say you have 40,000 monitoring and control points in a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system with 30 generators and 50-60 Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) among other things on the network. The incoming data picks up power metrics, temperatures, oil levels, vibration sensors, output waveforms, and more. It’d be nice if all that data were on one protocol in real time, available instantly without single points of failure.

This is the problem the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is facing right now at the Grand Coulee Dam, and provides the reason behind their choice of Real-Time Innovations’ (RTI’s) Data Distribution Service (DDS) as the solution. Dave Brown, project manager and system architect for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, remarked, “We selected RTI after a comprehensive evaluation of DDS solutions. We liked RTI’s architecture because it eliminates all single points of failure. If a shared daemon fails, it impacts many critical applications. With RTI’s purely in-process solution, there is no dependence on shared services. We will be able to implement N-way redundancy for all critical subsystems.” This makes RTI’s DDS software a pick for us, too.