Electrical & automation

Generate SCADA tags from an electrical I/O design

Between the electrical design phase and the SCADA programming phase sits one of the most thankless jobs in industrial automation: someone re-types thousands of tags by hand. This guide shows how to skip it — turning a project's I/O design into a ready-to-import SCADA tag file in seconds.

The problem: a perfectly good tag list, typed twice

Electrical and automation engineers produce accurate I/O and tag data during design. Then, further down the line, a different person opens the SCADA platform and keys those same tags in again — often thousands of them, across many near-identical cabinets. It is slow, and every manual entry is a chance to introduce an error the commissioning team has to hunt down later.

The data already exists. The gap is that the design world and the control-system world speak different file formats, so nothing carries across on its own. Ctrldesk's I/O & SCADA tool closes exactly that gap.

What Ctrldesk does — and, honestly, what it doesn't

Ctrldesk generates the part of a tag that is pure, repetitive re-typing: the tag name, the data type, and the description/documentation. It sanitises names to characters every platform accepts and de-duplicates them automatically.

Step by step

1. Open the I/O & SCADA tool

   It lives under the Tools menu and is available to the Electrical Engineer, Automation Engineer and Systems Integrator occupations. Set your occupation in Settings if you don't see it.

2. Bring your I/O in

   You have four routes, in order of least effort:

   • Pull from a design — if you built the I/O in a Ctrldesk project, one click brings the project's design-generated I/O straight in, no file in between.
   • Import CSV — save your Excel I/O list as CSV and drop it in. Columns are matched by meaning, so EPLAN, AutoCAD or hand-made lists all work.
   • Draft with AI — describe the plant and let AI propose a starting list to review.
   • By hand — add points directly.

   Every route runs through the same confirm step: it never overwrites an existing tag, and an I/O type it can't read is flagged rather than silently mis-typed.

3. Stamp out identical cabinets (if you have them)

   The common industrial pattern is one cabinet drawing reused for many identical cabinets. On the Cabinets tab, define the I/O once, then add each physical cabinet (or generate CB01…CB08 in one go). Put a # in a tag where the cabinet id belongs — #_PU01_Run becomes CB01_PU01_Run — and the tags stamp out per cabinet only on export. A redundant CPU pair stays a single tag set; redundancy lives in the binding, not in duplicated tags.

4. Export to your SCADA platform

   Hit Export to SCADA to preview the tags and their data types, then download a validated Ignition tag file (JSON) — import it via Tag Browser → Import — or a generic tag CSV that maps into most import wizards. An AVEVA InTouch DBLoad export is available in beta; test it with :mode=Test before a live load.

How the data types map

Discrete points (DI, DO and their safety and relay variants) export as Boolean. Analog points (AI, AO, RTD, TC) export as Float. Pulse points export as an integer, and comms points as a string. Unknown types are flagged, not guessed — so you fix them before they reach the control system.