The Lucid protocol can be used within your OT environment to save you money; this article lays out some of the ways how.

Cheaper devices

Lucid has been designed around technology which is commonly deployed, easily accessible, standardised and is freely available. Given these factors, more vendors are likely to implement Lucid than other, more complicated protocols. More vendors means more choice and more competition; more competition is likely to lead to lower product prices.

Greater device choice

With the expected increase in available products, it is hoped that there will be a greater choice of devices. Greater choice increases the likelihood that an appropriate device can be easily matched to a role within your organisation. So, whatever role you have planned for a device within your OT estate, it should be possible to directly match an appropriate device to that role with less customisation, thus saving costs.

Interoperability

It is important for components using a particular communications protocol to work easily together, so that the introduction of new devices to the system can be painless and that such a project gives expected results. This is the case for some of the common and long-lived protocols like Modbus; other protocols result in different levels of success! Where a protocol is not specific enough to support good interoperability, new devices may not plug and play as expected and a system’s users can be involved in extra work to cope with any disparities.

The Lucid Protocol has been shown to provide good interoperability after being tested in a number of WITS Plugfests, when different vendors’ devices were tested together. The WITS Protocol Standards Association also expect to provide a community-driven test suite which will allow vendors and users to run a set of tests against a Field Device or Supervisory Application to ensure it is compliant. Providing good interoperability allows the introduction of new devices or the validation of updated devices to a user’s system with minimum impact.

Flexible architecture

The use of MQTT to underpin Lucid has allowed many different scenarios to be supported, as we discussed in a previous article “Seven surprising ways to use Lucid”. Some of the new scenarios permit data sharing between Supervisory Applications. This means that there is no need to change existing deployments of devices with bespoke, over-the-air protocols. Instead, an intermediate Supervisory Application can be used to act as a proxy for those bespoke devices, making them available as Lucid devices to other Supervisory Applications.

This architecture has the advantage that vendors can move towards Lucid adoption and realise the benefits of Lucid for their clients without having to initially change their devices; instead, the approach is to provide server-level functions to mimic Lucid. Users get the advantage that they have early exposure to the use of Lucid, even on systems which generally use bespoke protocols, whilst staying in control of their enterprise interfaces.

Extensive functionality

The functionality provided by Lucid is extensive (as we have presented before in the article “One IoT protocol to rule them all…?”). Although much of the functionality was developed from the UK WASCs (Water and Sewerage Companies) it is appropriate for many different OT sectors. It is therefore very likely that Lucid will meet your needs, especially if you are a UK WASC. This prevents any expensive workarounds to get the functions you need from your new devices.

Reduced staff training costs

For those users already using WITS-DNP3, many of the functions in Lucid come from WITS-DNP3 and use the same terminology and operating principles. The reuse of well understood WITS-DNP3 principles will save these users time in retraining staff and the adoption of new practices. This includes approaches to configuration and alarm generation rules.

More efficient integration with other systems

To save cost, a user could reduce and standardise the types of interfaces they use within their business for systems to communicate with each other. If Lucid was one of these interface types, and it is supported by a given system, then it would become easier for users to incorporate and maintain that system in their estate.

A user utilising a vendor’s specific or bespoke interface, as opposed to the Lucid Protocol, would need to integrate that interface into the enterprise and then put in place the people, practices and procedures to support the interface. Whereas utilising Lucid as an interface would allow users to leverage the staff and procedures they already have, helping to reduce cost and complexity within the business.

Summary

This article has reviewed a series of reasons why the Lucid Protocol would save implementation and operating costs, compared to similar systems which use proprietary protocols. Hopefully these arguments are compelling enough to get you interested in adopting Lucid and you can begin your cost saving journey!

Mark Davison (Terzo Digital) and Dave Howarth (NWL)

December 2025

Terzo Digital and NWL have collaborated on a number of articles about Lucid in support of the protocol. You find find a list of those articles with a brief summary of their contents here.