GPS Tracking

[LorenRosero]

We see a mentioning in our ppts of the capability to do GPS tracking with the Geo SCADA.  The question is.. how.  So we see the objects/users have the location attribute, but what about a vehicle? If we have access to a vehicle fleet monitoring service provider with GPS systems, how do we connect it to SCADA?  Is this explained in the Geo SCADA help guide and I just missed it? Thank you for your help.

[sbeadle · Accepted solution]

Hi! Here's an introduction.

To show anything's location on a map it needs to have a Latitude and a Longitude. Usually to display this we use the pre-built database fields in the Aggregate 'CGISLocation'. And we need a way to feed the two Latitude and Longitude numbers into these fields.

If you wish to track an RTU, then the location should be available as two 'analogue' point values, and when they are read you need to push these values into the CGISLocation fields on an object (for example, the RTU object itself). I don't know what GPS hardware you have, and I hope other people can advise how to read from the GPS hardware and store that into registers.

Alternatively you might have locations for things coming from an external database or application. In this case you need to feed these also into the same CGISLocation fields.

In order to write into these location fields you need to alter the location type property on an object to 'Dynamic'. (See image).

Then you need to write into the values. 1131 Logic can do this - and can run when new data values are available.

For example (not a complete example):

I hope this helps.

Steve

[LorenR]

Hi @sbeadle 

I have fwd your response to our S.I. but I'm afraid it is still not clear enough for them to implement it.. So we have already located assets on the map the regular way using the Latitude and Longitude as you mentioned below, but we haven't been able to make the Dynamic location work, and even less to integrate the GPS vehicle fleet monitoring service to the SCADA.  We're stuck I believe in the how to bring/feed these values to the dynamic location of the object, and about the GPS vehicle fleet monitoring system,  what kind of object should even be used to connect that system to the SCADA. And I'm afraid I have no experience developing scripts to guide them. 

Steve, is there a place, a manual, anything with instructions that we could follow to make this work?

Thanks again.

[BevanWeiss]

There really isn't much difference between Static / Dynamic for the GeoLocation, other than where the Latitude/Longitude are stored (Static is in the Config stream, Dynamic is in the Data stream).

So, you need to get the Latitude and Longitude from your field into the SCADA.  How you do this is not a Schneider thing.  You could use a web service hook to get it from a cloud service, or read it as a string from a GPS capable GSM modem, or read it as two REAL values from somewhere... it doesn't matter.

Once you have that value, then as @sbeadle mentioned, you just need a piece of Logic, whether you do this as FBD, LAD or ST doesn't matter, but it should be triggered 'On Change' of the Latitude/Longitude from paragraph one (1).  Hence having the latitude/longitude as a Point is advised, since that makes the logic triggering easy.

If the SI is having problems breaking down this problem into the individual parts, and executing these, there are other SIs available which could perform this work 😉

[sbeadle]

This is less of a GPS problem and more of an integration problem.

Geo SCADA has lots of ways to get data values from external systems into the right place.

I think the S.I. needs to describe the source of data and understand how it can be read.

For example, is it in a SQL database which can be read by ODBC?

Or is there a web service which a program can poll?

Or in a file which can be opened and read at intervals?