LEC AIM Processes and Functionality

Each customer’s use of LEC AIM will vary depending on how their LEC servers are configured and their organization’s OT infrastructure. For example, some customers may use NMS and some may use CGI OMS. Furthermore, some customers may not choose to use all available features of the LEC AIM application. The following outlines the steps in the LEC AIM process:

  1. LEC AIM makes a request through REST for the point names and types available on the SCADA or EMS system. This request is processed by a web server (typically a Windows IIS web server running on the same machine as an LEC Server instance) and then sent to the LEC Server as a SOAP message.
  2. LEC Server makes a request for all the point names available from the associated SCADA (or EMS) system.
  3. The SCADA (or EMS) system responds to the LEC Server with the names and types of available points, and then the LEC Server:
    • generates a text file in CSV format from the point names and types.
    • sends a SOAP message to the web server that contains this text file.
  4. The web server transmits this file to the LEC AIM application running on the NMS (or CGI OMS) machine.
  5. LEC AIM processes this message with a report of available points on the SCADA (or EMS) system. It then gathers information about the Oracle NMS (or CGI OMS) configuration by directly querying the system’s database or reading from a dump of relevant tables in CSV format.
  6. LEC AIM processes all of this gathered information to map each point from SCADA (or EMS) to a known device and device attribute in NMS (or CGI OMS).
  7. After processing this information, the LEC AIM will:
    • generate reports with information about changes on the SCADA (or EMS) system and information about any exceptions encountered during processing.
    • assign a unique RTP address to each mapped point and device attribute.
    • generate an LEC Server batch file with the point names and RTP addresses.
    • generate a SQL file that uses these RTP addresses, the device names, and the device attributes to update the staging configuration tables in NMS (or CGI OMS).
  8. Then, if configured to do so, the LEC AIM application can:
    • load the LEC Server batch file into the remote LEC server, the LEC server running on the Windows machine).
    • load the mapping information into the NMS (or CGI OMS) staging configuration tables by running the previously generated SQL.
    • load the NMS (or CGI OMS) staging configuration tables into the production configuration tables.
    • direct NMS (or CGI OMS) to invoke the ICCP adapter to update their measurements and controls tables while preserving any existing quality codes or stored data values.
    • switch the LEC Server instance with the updated batch file loaded into an Active state so that it can establish an RTP association with the NMS (or CGI OMS) and an ICCP association with the SCADA (or EMS) system.

Note: The LEC Server’s Real-Time Protocol (RTP) is developed by engineers that provide a simple TCP/IP interface for transmitting real time values. It is not related to the Real-time transport protocol used to stream real-time audio and video data described in the IETF’s RFC 3550.

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