The East Gippsland region embraces an area formally administered by four Water Boards and encompasses 10% of Victoria. Geographically this covers an area from Bairnsdale to Dinner Plain in the north and Mallacoota in the eastern tip of Victoria. Most towns are located on the coastal plains, exceptions being Omeo, Dinner Plain and Swifts Creek in the high country.
East Gippsland Water (EGW) provides the full range of retail water supply functions, including water harvesting and storage, water treatment, urban water supply, and wastewater collection, treatment, disposal and re-use, as well as trade waste services to small industrial and commercial customers.
Implementing a new SCADA system throughout East Gippsland Water’s region became a priority in 2006. This major investment by East Gippsland Water was awarded to PARASYN. The project included work to upgrade switchboards and the SCADA system under two different major contracts. The initial stages of the project were completed in April of 2008 and subsequent additions to the system have been commissioned. The field testing and handover training are currently nearing completion.
Project Drivers
There are a number of factors which have driven the need for a new fully integrated SCADA package to the majority of East Gippsland Water’s assets. They are:
• To meet Occupational Health & Safety and WorkCover Guidelines for risk management for water assets;
• To meet the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act 2003;
• To monitor parameters such as pressure, flow and continuity of supply to ensure all customer commitments are met; and
• To enhance security of supply and reduce leakage.
• To give EGW the ability to monitor the network parameters and water quality from a holistic view.
The initial focus for East Gippsland Water and PARASYN Controls was water quality and the extensive real-time monitoring of water treatment facilities, with work concentrating on the design of field monitoring equipment, computer hardware and software. PARASYN’s role as a turnkey project delivery group included the design and supply of telemetry panels, all software systems, and to ensure all sites were commissioned and operational within the desired timeline (This was delayed due to East Gippsland’s widespread bush fires, and flooding and the subsequent need for East Gippsland Water’s resources to be deployed to ensure continuity of services to their customers).
Objectives
The overall objectives for the new EGW SCADA were:
1. Decrease Risk
The implementation of a telemetry monitoring system will enable EGW to monitor its water quality processes at its remote sites, thus minimising the risk of non-compliance to water quality standards.
2. Increase Operational Efficiency
The implementation of a telemetry monitoring system also allows for increases in operational efficiency by quickly identifying issues & reducing outage times on site, and extending the ability to recover information of the operational processes in practice, to better identify areas of improvement.
3. Increase System Usability
Due to the remoteness of certain assets of the EGW system, visiting these sites to recover data is a difficult and a time consuming process. Implementing a telemetry monitoring system increases system usability by providing a means to access remote site information through a central SCADA interface, available over the PSTN network.
Wide-Ranging Integration Development
Architecture
Kingfisher Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) were selected as the hardware interface between the SCADA platform and all remote plant field sensors and PLC units.
RTU Interfaces were developed between the following PLC units to provide seamless transfer of process data and operational controls:
• Rockwell SLC500 Series
• Hitachi
• Allen Bradley Compact Logix
• Unitronics
Field RTU and PLC units manage all fully automated unattended tasks. The HMI (SCADA application) itself is not used for any critical tasks that may relate to safety of personnel or equipment. Similarly the operation of the control systems do not depend on the status of the HMI. It is possible for the distribution and process systems to remain fully functional for a period should the HMI become inoperable.
Engineered Solution
EGW sites that are monitored by the telemetry system have been categorised into one of two primary site types: Pump Stations and Water Treatment Plants (WTPs). Remote telemetry operations have been restricted to system monitoring only for the majority of the SCADA system implementation for both Pump Station & Water Treatment Plant sites. The system manages functionality including:
• Storage Management Hitachi
• Treatment
• Hi-lift pumping
• Water Quality Monitoring
• Flow Control for network supply
The SCADA system gives EGW the ability to manage their system and the analytic benefit to review the network holistically to allow them to make system enhancement to improve process control. Already some enhancements are in motion to provide better controls and data monitoring. The platform put in place by PARASYN allows for rapid deployment of enhancements and new sites as they are required.
The Master RTUs communicate with each remote outstation RTU via PSTN modems. The system supports periodic background polling (interrogating sites for stored data) and change of state reporting (often referred to as exception reporting). Exception reports are generated when a high priority alarm occurs at an outstation RTU.
The system diagrams “Communications Topology” and “Computer Topology” are included to show how PARASYN Controls design a system in detail before any development takes place. These drawings graphically represent the relationship between each RTU and the computer network located at Bairnsdale head office. Remote access to the HMI computers and historian are established via the internet using VPN. This form of remote access was used extensively during commissioning as remote commissioning engineers were not in the Bairnsdale office to validate each point as it was tested back to base.
The enterprise solution also includes a sophisticated back office reporting system platform. It leverages the benefits of both “true historian technology” and relational databases. Automated reports are generated using Microsoft Reporting Services so that future business requirements presently unknown can be developed using standard tools. The process historian stores and compresses the raw data sets without filtering or truncating any data quality. This way data is not missing in the future when modellers and planners look back into the past to understand how to plan for and control the future. When we don’t yet know what we don’t know its best practice to save it all. Relational and proprietary HMI databases rarely provide that long term benefit or assurance to the asset owners.
Developing the Solution
A focus was put on usability, maintainability and compatibility with existing hardware for the SCADA HMI. The EGW SCADA system includes the following features to create the desired focus:
• Geographical user interface to enable an operator or user to easily navigate the HMI making use of multiple intuitive methods of navigation, catering for both small distributed assets and large plant (treatment plants), management of communications equipment which can sometimes seem complicated and confusing to operational staff and low level testing and diagnostic features.
• AXOLA - ActiveX Operator Log & Alarms database is used to create a depth of usability by adding functionality that enables a user to filter on events and alarm data. Redundant in its capacity to provide and store alarms native to CitectSCADA, AXOLA one of PARASYN’s latest middleware products allows users to get easy access to operator actions, alarms, events and even operator annotations creating an audit trail powerfully useful when dissecting a system after a critical event has occurred.
• Wonderware SCADAlarm provides alarm paging for critical alarms creating system wide annunciation of events and the capacity to remotely manage those events via the telephone. This system replaces the existing Auto dialler system which is located and configured locally at each site. The new system gives operators the ability to control alarming for all sites from one central location, enhancing flexibility.
• Wonderware Historian and Microsoft Reporting Services provides access to current and past data adding means to track critical events and improve both reliability and efficiency.
Normally when coordinating large systems many components are from different manufacturers. This can be a big issue as disparate platforms struggle to communicate efficiently or even communicate at all. Unless a detailed understanding of each platform exists the enterprise solution is laced with risk. The experience to manage these barriers is vital for all enterprise solutions.
PARASYN Controls decided to utilise multiple electrical contractors for site installation due to a highly compressed timeline. This enabled multiple sites to be installed at once and ensured flexibility. Another benefit of this approach was realised when some areas of EGW’s region was inaccessible due to fires and then flooding. Having local contractors in remote locations allowed work to progress unaffected. Employing local contractors contributed to the local economy in these areas.
Executing and managing multiple contractors remotely required advanced project management to ensure all aspects of site works were covered and the timeline not compromised. Regular contractor-client communications are a cornerstone to PARASYN’s success in all aspects of our business and have been implemented throughout this project. Another key process of a successful project is ensuring all OHS&E issues are identified and controlled via documented and easy to follow procedures and instructions. PARASYN take pride in our history of no lost time due to work related incidents/accidents. We are committed to ensuring that every project is managed to advanced industry standards.
PARASYN commissioned the system remotely from Queensland, a difficult task that was accomplished through a collaborative effort between PARASYN, EGW and the local contractors.
In integrating the local WTP HMI systems into the larger SCADA system PARASYN were able to retain the “look and feel” of the existing system within the PARASYN shell. This allows operations “familiarity” between both systems, improving maintainability and consistency of data presentation for local and remote operators.
During the project life cycle macro issues relating to bush fires, the subsequent contamination of water supplies and then drought, impacted greatly on being able to execute the project plan as it was originally conceived. Flexibility and accommodating changing business requirements hampered the design stages of the project however none of these interferences fell outside the grasp of an outcomes driven project delivery team.
The EGW SCADA & Information System is an initiative encompassing remote monitoring to provide early warning of faults or performance issues at key facilities. The performance outcomes include; minimizing operational problems, improving equipment reliability, compliance with government regulations and improved customer service.
The initial focus for East Gippsland Water and PARASYN Controls was water quality and the extensive real-time monitoring of water treatment facilities. Work packages concentrated on the design of field monitoring and control equipment, computer hardware and software systems. PARASYN’s role as a turnkey project delivery group included the design and supply of telemetry panels, all software systems, and to ensure all sites were commissioned and operational within the desired timeline
Today PARASYN is working closely with the key stakeholders within East Gippsland Water to ensure that the system is sustainable and easily manageable for years to come.
Future Aspirations
Over the next few years the use of the new SCADA system will be expanded to cover other key facilities and assets. With the implementation of the new SCADA system over PSTN, EGW are now looking to the future reliability of the system. PARASYN Controls are currently working collaboratively with EGW to investigate the use of wireless public radio technologies (NextG) to provide a secondary communications path for their critical remote sites. Trials and field testing is ensuring that the application of new technology improves overall system performance.
Stand out Achievements
The EGW SCADA and Information System project stands out as a reference for turnkey projects that require the discipline from electrical interface through to back office web reports delivered to the system owners desktop. The most demanding elements of this project were the need for tight control of remote subcontractors, a highly compressed timeline owing to bushfire and water quality issues and the wide level of disciplines that needed to be coordinated to execute the project to superior standards.
back to Zenith Awards 2008.