GridOps White Papers · Information
SCADA Says Closed. Do You Know It's Closed?
An indication is a report from a device. It's usually right. Usually is the part worth training.
3 min read
Control systems are very good at showing state. They're so good that it's easy to forget the screen is showing an indication: a signal from an auxiliary contact, a position sensor, or a communication path, each of which can be wrong on its own.
Most of the time the indication and the device agree. The cases where they don't tend to show up at bad times: after a storm, after maintenance, after a communications outage, or when a mechanism doesn't finish its travel.
GridOps labels information by where it comes from. INDICATED means the control system shows it. REPORTED means someone told you. KNOWN means it's been confirmed or comes from a fixed record. These aren't a ranking of trust; each has strengths and failure modes.
The skill is noticing which kind of information a decision is resting on, and whether the decision would still be sound if that one piece turned out to be wrong. That's a habit, and habits come from repetition.