SCADA applications (water, power, oil and gas) in SCADA systems - Mini Project: Build & Apply

SCADA Applications for Water, Power, and Oil & Gas

📖 Scenario: You are working as a junior DevOps engineer supporting a SCADA system that monitors critical infrastructure: water supply, power grid, and oil & gas pipelines. Your task is to create a simple data structure representing sensor readings from these three sectors, configure alert thresholds, process the data to find sensors exceeding thresholds, and finally display the alerting sensors.

🎯 Goal: Build a small SCADA data monitoring script that stores sensor readings, sets alert thresholds, identifies sensors with readings above thresholds, and prints the alerting sensors.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary named sensor_readings with exact sensor names and their readings

Create a dictionary named alert_thresholds with exact threshold values for each sector

Write a loop to find sensors with readings above their sector's threshold

Print the list of alerting sensors with their readings

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

SCADA systems monitor critical infrastructure like water supply, power grids, and oil pipelines to ensure safety and efficiency.

💼 Career

DevOps engineers supporting SCADA systems need to handle sensor data, configure alerts, and automate monitoring tasks to prevent failures.

1

Create sensor readings dictionary

Create a dictionary called sensor_readings with these exact entries: 'water_sensor_1': 75, 'water_sensor_2': 55, 'power_sensor_1': 120, 'power_sensor_2': 95, 'oil_sensor_1': 85, 'oil_sensor_2': 65.

SCADA systems

# Create the sensor_readings dictionary with exact sensor names and readings
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with sensor names as keys and their readings as values.

2

Set alert thresholds for each sector

Create a dictionary called alert_thresholds with these exact entries: 'water': 60, 'power': 100, 'oil': 80.

SCADA systems

sensor_readings = {
    'water_sensor_1': 75,
    'water_sensor_2': 55,
    'power_sensor_1': 120,
    'power_sensor_2': 95,
    'oil_sensor_1': 85,
    'oil_sensor_2': 65
}
# Create the alert_thresholds dictionary with exact sector thresholds
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a dictionary with sector names as keys and threshold values as integers.

3

Find sensors exceeding thresholds

Create a list called alerting_sensors that contains tuples of sensor name and reading for sensors whose reading is greater than their sector's threshold. Use a for loop with variables sensor and reading to iterate over sensor_readings.items(). Determine the sector by splitting the sensor name at the underscore and use it to compare with alert_thresholds.

SCADA systems

sensor_readings = {
    'water_sensor_1': 75,
    'water_sensor_2': 55,
    'power_sensor_1': 120,
    'power_sensor_2': 95,
    'oil_sensor_1': 85,
    'oil_sensor_2': 65
}

alert_thresholds = {
    'water': 60,
    'power': 100,
    'oil': 80
}

# Create alerting_sensors list with sensors exceeding their sector threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a loop to check each sensor's reading against its sector threshold and add to the list if above.

4

Print alerting sensors

Write a print statement to display the alerting_sensors list.

SCADA systems

sensor_readings = {
    'water_sensor_1': 75,
    'water_sensor_2': 55,
    'power_sensor_1': 120,
    'power_sensor_2': 95,
    'oil_sensor_1': 85,
    'oil_sensor_2': 65
}

alert_thresholds = {
    'water': 60,
    'power': 100,
    'oil': 80
}

alerting_sensors = []
for sensor, reading in sensor_readings.items():
    sector = sensor.split('_')[0]
    if reading > alert_thresholds[sector]:
        alerting_sensors.append((sensor, reading))

# Print the alerting_sensors list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(alerting_sensors) to show the sensors that triggered alerts.