New SCADA and Greater Mobility for Large Water-Management Agency

Project Scope:

• Tags: 50,000
• Screens: 1,000
• Clients: 50 users
• Alarms: 20,000
• Devices used: 575
• Architectures used: Standard with VMWARE Esxi
• Databases used: PostgreSQL
• Historical data logged: 40,000

Project Summary:

The evolution of Réseau31 agents' missions requires more and more mobility and access to management and supervision tools using mobile terminals (smartphones, tablets). In addition, the rapid changes in the infrastructure to be monitored and operated (organic changes in the network, maintenance, new contracts, etc.) require frequent changes to the applications.

Problem:

The legacy supervision application does not have mobility functionality nor the possibility to create/modify projects online; incidentally, internal and external collaborative work (such as working with subcontractors) is impossible.

Solution:

Réseau31 — a public union for water, sanitation, and irrigation services in Haute-Garonne, France — selected Ignition by Inductive Automation as the new software platform to renovate its control system. The mission was executed with several companies collaborating at different levels: general design assistance, project development and deployment.

Réseau31 has a large diversity among its 1,400 facilities, including water treatment plants, mountain catchments (basins), dams, and hydroelectric plants. Ignition, with its Perspective web visualization module, has made it possible to meet the need for ubiquity; any agent or client, depending on its credentials, can use the application on a desktop computer, in the machine room on a panel PC, and on a tablet or smartphone. Similarly, the application was developed to be an object-oriented language, meaning that changes could be made once, then deployed to all clients. 

The Ignition platform has also made it possible to create not one application (replacing the legacy one), but several, using a multi-project approach. On the same server. For a single license fee. To date, Réseau31 has a supervision application and a hypervision, a decision support tool dedicated to managers and department heads.

The needs covered are broader: control and command, monitoring of the overall operation of the water network (volumes distributed, flows, leak detection, etc.), monitoring of water quality, and monitoring of general consumption. Useful indicators such as m3/kW are now possible and will allow better management.