SCADA stands for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. The primary purpose of SCADA is to monitor, control and alarm plant or other process systems from a central location. As the name indicates, it is not a full control system, but rather focuses on the supervisorylevel. As such, it is a purely software package that is positioned on top of hardware to which it is interfaced, in general via Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), or other commercial hardware modules.
