Design of HART compliant analog input module for indigenous SCADA system

Highway Addressable Remote Transducer (HART) is an open fieldbus protocol for industrial automation and implemented in almost all the commercially available field transmitters and actuators. This paper details the intricacies and challenges involved in designing a HART Analog Input Module (HAIM) for the indigenous Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) solution developed at the Control and Instrumentation Group of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Thiruvananthapuram, based on C-DAC's proven Industrial Controller (iCON) platform. The paper outlines and discusses the various hardware and software components developed as part of this module and presents the bigger picture of how this module seamlessly integrates with the existing iCON platform. Results obtained with the upgraded iCON system with HAIM in place are pondered upon. The main objective of this paper is to bring out the salient features of employing an open and widely accepted fieldbus standard like HART over the proprietary architecture deployed by iCON based SCADA systems in the past.