Case Study: TEVA API Pharmaceuticals, Hungary

TEVA combines tunnelling and aggregation to network OPC data through a firewall

Laszlo Simon is the Engineering Manager for the TEVA API plant in Debrecen, Hungary. He had a project that sounded simple enough. Connect new control applications through several OPC stations to an existing SCADA network. The plant was already running large YOKOGAWA DCS and GE PLC control systems, connected to a number of distributed SCADA workstations. However, Mr. Simon did face a couple of interesting challenges in this project:

• The OPC servers and SCADA systems were on different computers, separated by a company firewall. This makes it extremely difficult to connect OPC over a network, because of the complexities of configuring DCOM and Windows security permissions.
• Each SCADA system needed to access data from all of the new OPC server stations. This meant Mr. Simon needed a way to aggregate data from all the OPC stations into a single common data set.

After searching the web, Mr. Simon downloaded and installed DataHub® software. Very quickly he was able to connect a DataHub instance to each of his OPC servers, and determine that he was reading live process data from TEVA’s new control systems. He was also able to easily set up OPC tunnelling links between the OPC server stations and the SCADA workstations, by simply installing another DataHub instance on each SCADA computer and configuring it to connect to the OPC server stations. This unique combination allows him to view data from both OPC servers on either SCADA system

“I wanted to reduce and simplify the communication over the network because of our firewall. It was very easy with DataHub software.” said Mr. Simon after the system was up and running. Currently about 7,000 points are being transferred across the network, in real-time. “In the future, the additional integration of the existing or new OPC servers will be with DataHub technology.”