Citect is now a group of industrial software products sold by Aveva, but started as a software development company specialising in the Automation and Control industry. The main software products developed by Citect included CitectSCADA, CitectSCADA Reports, and Ampla.
History
Citect began as a subsidiary of Alfa Laval in 1973. The company was then known as Control Instrumentation. A name change of the company took place to Ci Technologies, and then to Citect to take advantage of the well known name of its flagship software product, CitectSCADA.
Whilst Citect was considered to be a software development company, it also had a large Professional Services division, which was a key contributor to the success of the business.
In 2006, Citect Pty Ltd was acquired by the Schneider Electric group.
At the end of 2008, Citect ceased trading as an independent company and all of its remaining operations were absorbed into Schneider Electric.
Products
Ampla
Ampla is Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) software.
Cicode
Cicode is a programming language used by Citect SCADA software. The structure and syntax of Cicode is very similar to that of the Pascal programming language, the main difference being that it does not include pointers and associated concepts. Citect provides a rich programming API that includes sophisticated programming constructs such as concurrent tasks and semaphores.
A Cicode sample is shown below. The function is used to log information to a file.
FUNCTION I0_Trace(STRING sPrompt)
INT hDev; INT hTime; STRING sText;
IF hTraceOn THEN
IF (StrLeft(sPrompt, StrLength(sMask)) = sMask) THEN
TraceMsg(sPrompt);
hTime = TimeCurrent(); sText = TimeToStr(hTime, 2)+" "+TimeToStr(hTime, 1)+" "+sPrompt;
SemWait(hDebugSem, 10); FileWriteLn(hDebugFile, sText); SemSignal(hDebugSem); END END END
CitectSCADA
CitectSCADA is a HMI / SCADA software package supporting
an extremely wide range of Schneider Electric and 3rd party PLCs (using vendor's OPC driver or its own native drivers) and a big collection of symbols of industrial equipments for drawing the application scenes
made by Citect with a design-time HMI/GUI construction tool (called Citect Graphics Builder) and
a run-time application logics expressed in the Cicode programming language.
Citect for DOS
Martin Roberts wrote Citect for DOS, released in 1987, as a response to the limited range of PC-based operator interface software available at the time. Citect for DOS consisted of a configuration database (in dBase format), a bitmap (256 colour raw format) and an animation file. The user would draw a representation of a facility using the readily available Dr Halo graphical package and placing "Animation Points" in the desired location. "Tags" were assigned in the configuration databases, equating to addresses within the programmable electronic devices Citect was communicating with. By referencing these tags at animation points using other configuration databases, the user could show the state of equipment such as running, stopped or faulted in real-time.
Citect for DOS could communicate with various programmable electronic devices via the various serial links offered by the device; some through direct PC serial port connections, others through 3rd party PC based cards designed to communicate with the target programmable electronic device. Software drivers were written for many protocols; its ability to communicate with a variety of devices - and to have new drivers written when required - became a primary selling point for Citect.
The runtime software ran on a DSI card; a 32 bit co-processor that was inserted into an available ISA slot in the PC. This was due to insufficient processing power available in the 286 and 386 PCs available at the time.
Citect for Windows
Version 1
During the early 1990s PC computational power had caught up and Microsoft Windows based software was becoming popular, so Citect for Windows was developed and released in 1992. It no longer needed the DSI card to run on a PC. The configuration methodology remained similar to Citect for DOS but became more intuitive under MS Windows. Citect for Windows was written as a direct response to a request by Argyle Diamonds. The company was originally intending to use a Honeywell system until a number of Arygle's site engineers talked Argyle around to Citect after highlighting the existing problems they were having with Honeywell systems on site. Argyle contributed $1 million to the development of Citect for Windows. To this day the "ArgDig" alarm database (i.e. Argyle Digital) is still part of Citect.