CIMPLICITY Architectures & Engine

Flexibility to serve any HMI/SCADA application

Manufacturing engineer using GE Digital HMI/SCADA software

Flexible architectures to meet your needs

CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA Provides Plant-Wide Visualization

CIMPLICITY is a highly reliable true client/server HMI/SCADA solution that provides visualization and control across diverse manufacturing and infrastructure industries.

Client server technology
Object oriented
Classes and objects
Event engine

Learn more in our Basic Configuration Decisions overview.

Download Basic Configuration Overview

CIMPLICITY SCADA software screenshot | client-server visualization

High Availability & Redundancy

CIMPLICITY also offers high availability and redundancy including:

Host redundancy
Windows cluster support
Dynamic configuration and dynamic change support
Support for high availability hardware
System Health Parameters
System Sentry: Constantly watches HMI and system parameters

Learn more in our High Availability with CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA guide.

Download High Availablity Guide

Increase data reliability with CIMPLICITY

As part of highly critical applications where state transitions are important, polled SCADA systems fail as they are likely to miss state transitions during flood conditions.

In these scenarios, the CIMPLICITY server will buffer the time-stamped data and continue to process the events in order to ensure those states are captured and logged to a historian for analysis. That’s data reliability you can trust.

High scalability supports long-term value

CIMPLICITY is an event-based SCADA server that processes data efficiently to enable high scalability. This event processing happens at all layers of the architecture to ensure incoming data is captured, reported, and stored in a historian for long-term use.

The event-based design impacts how data is captured from devices, processed, and made available to clients. The driver interfaces support unsolicited reports from devices that have that capability. This means that the drivers only process data that changes, the CIMPLICITY SCADA then only processes data from the drivers that have changed. For the client/server communications, the server only publishes data changes to the clients.

This overall design allows for limiting resource utilization unless necessary, making most efficient use of the available resources from small embedded PC applications to enterprise applications with hundreds of thousands of points on a single server.

While testing allowed us to achieve over a million points on a single server, we always recommend ensuring you leave capacity for data floods and future expansion.

To poll or not to poll?

Several SCADA vendors are still only leveraging a polling engine. This means that the SCADA server polls the driver for the latest value of a tag, processes it (checking for alarms, conversions, etc.) whether the data has changed or not.

This method results in limited scalability, as system resources are consumed continuously. This method also poses challenges in some applications with high transitions, as a polling engine could miss a data transition in between data polling.

Enterprise scalability

CIMPLICITY HMI/SCADA from GE Digital offers one of the richest HMI/SCADA feature sets

CIMPLICITY can run on its own or in an enterprise architecture.

In an enterprise architecture, you can create a layered approach to aggregating data from subsystems. You can use CIMPLICITY servers as local servers that aggregate the data from your devices locally and make it available to the CIMPLICITY enterprise server.

CIMPLICITY leverages the concept of an enterprise point which is as simple as a checkbox on a point. By doing this, you can be selective about which points are brought to the next level and avoid duplicate communications of the same data to multiple systems.