Manufacturing

Case Study:

New wave SCADA

20 January 2009

OCWA operates 502 treatment facilities, serving more than 30 per cent of Ontario’s population with water treatment services

Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) has combined its in-house development with Wonderware technology to provide a more responsive service, within the business and to external agencies.

The Ontario Clean Water Agency provides a comprehensive range of reliable, cost-effective and environmentally responsible water and wastewater services to clients, including municipalities, private sector companies and First Nations. It operates 502 treatment facilities, serving more than 30 per cent of Ontario’s population with water treatment services, and more than 40 per cent with wastewater treatment services.

Supporting this operations and maintenance (O&M) core are OCWA’s engineering and technical advisory services, which include the SCADA team. OCWA offers professional consulting services to clients undertaking the construction, expansion or upgrading of their water and/or wastewater infrastructure, as well as optimisation services, asset management, instrumentation, and SCADA development.

OCWA undertook a very in-depth study of the various solutions and, due to the specification, the selection was made mainly on features and capabilities rather than price or other criteria.

“Wonderware was the only one that provided a solution to our required level of complexity,” says Bob Simpson, asset management and operational systems support manager. “In wide area SCADA it is all about managing complexity, in every aspect. That means in many remote sites, long distances, weak or bad communication, many tags (IOs), tough security requirements and many remote clients, for human machine interface (HMI), data or alarms. Wonderware provided an answer to every challenge we had. Our larger systems will have in excess of 50,000 IOs and about 15,000 historical tags and more than 90 sites, all controlled from one location. Our current system handles more than 1,000 alarms through SCADAlarm.”

Wonderware provided an answer to every challenge we had

Bob Simpson, Ontario Clean Water Agency Sophisticated OS group-based security, combined with IPSec and real-time gateways, allow for secure access to computers and applications. Bad communication is handled through store and forward mechanisms at PLC level. None of this would be possible without a versatile solution that allows for standardisation. OCWA’s Instrumentation, Automation and SCADA Group is responsible for deploying all of the installations. Their experts have experience in numerous program languages and software configurations, and they use that knowledge to develop OCWA’s uniform approach to programming and screen development.

This team found that Wonderware’s System Platform, which is based on Microsoft technology, and InTouch HMI could be integrated with the in-house program Outpost 5 and OCWA’s existing asset management system and process data collection (PDC) database.

Ciprian Panfilie, SCADA developer team lead, explains: “It’s easy because everything is developed as a template. We have a template structure at the Wonderware System Platform level, the reporting level, the security level, the graphic level, and we have templates that integrate with other packages as well. We have them all here in our lab so everything is fully tested and we maintain our standards.”

This article first appeared in issue 15 of Prime magazine.

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