SUPDUT: An Environment to Implement Logic Control Applications for Pipelines

The reliable operation of product transfers in pipelines is essential to the economic results of a pipeline company. This operation heavily depends on calculations performed over real time raw and historical data to assure the expected level of confidence in the operational results. This paper describes the development of a software environment, SUPDUT (abbreviation for the portuguese term Supervisor de Oleodutos, or Pipeline Supervisor), to be used in the development, organization, execution and maintenance of operational applications and to support their communication with other corporate and basic real time systems (SCADA). Application in this context means all kinds of operational or corporate calculations that require information from SCADA. The main advantage of the SUPDUT architecture is that it simplifies the application development and maintenance process, by providing a server that deals with all the complexity related to SCADA communication and application scheduling. The application developer therefore does not need to be concerned with those issues. It also makes the application development independent from the SCADA that collects real time data. The environment is designed to facilitate a simple and rapid implementation of new applications with a minimal impact on the system. Other important SUPDUT environment features are: complete object-oriented design, planned support for distributed applications and reliable application scheduling, support for a wide range of application scheduling options, support for multiple SCADA, support for multiple languages for application development (FORTRAN, C, C++ and Java) and robustness to the addition of new applications. The SUPDUT environment requirements definition and design are completed, and it is in its coding phase as this paper is being written. The first production version of the software is expected to be delivered by the end of 2002.