Articles
Do It Yourself SCADA Replacement
May 2, 2007
•Article: Do It Yourself SCADA Replacement
Shawn Derrington of Georgetown Municipal Water & Sewer Service offers advice on building the SCADA system you need
By Christopher Little, Trihedral Engineering Limited
When the Georgetown Municipal Water & Sewer Service evaluated the cost of upgrading their existing SCADA software in 2006, they decided it was time to consider replacements. After much research, it became clear that not only was it possible to get all the features they were missing; they could do most of the configuration in-house.
Named in honor of George Washington, Georgetown Kentucky is home to 20,000 residents, a private liberal arts college, and one of the largest car manufacturing plants in the US.
The Georgetown Municipal Water & Sewer Service (GMWSS) is comprised of a water plant, three waste water treatment plants, a few dozen lift stations, and five water towers. These are monitored and controlled by approximately thirty remote telemetry units (RTU's), each communicating with a central base station RTU over spread spectrum radio.
Shawn Derrington is the IT Director and Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer at Georgetown Municipal Water & Sewer Service. When he came aboard two and a half years ago he inherited a SCADA HMI software application that posed a variety of challenges for its users. "There was nobody to maintain [the original software]. There were lots of things we couldn't do with it or we didn't like about it, but we had no way to make changes." says Derrington.
Challenges included:
- Information could only be monitored via two unconnected HMI computers: "The water plant operators had the main computer at the plant for reference and system control. If anyone else wanted any system information, they had to go there or call and ask. The second computer was at our Wastewater Plant #1. It monitored all of the pump stations for runtimes, power fails, seal fails, etc. It was only available in one building on the far side of the complex."
- Limited report manager: "All we had in terms of historical data were these daily and monthly reports of runtimes and flows. The reports were stored as individual text files so there was no easy way to compare or compile data."
- Third party alarm dialer: The system used a third-party alarm dialer which posed serious compatibility issues during software upgrades or version replacements.
•Article: Do It Yourself SCADA Replacement
SOURCE: Trihedral Engineering Limited
