Collaborative Effort Produces Great Results...
The City of Junction City has been upgrading their Water and Waste Water Controls Systems to provide better control and alarm notification. The City sent out a Request For Proposal to some of the top Systems Integration Houses in Oregon for selection of their “City's System Integrator of Record” to form a partnering approach to their growing Integration needs. After review of all the RFP's the City Selected 3 Integration Houses to interview and TAG was selected for the Role.
One of the challenges of Designing a SCADA system is to match the Visualization Package to the System being supplied and what is existing to what best fits the City's needs. TAG worked hand in hand with the City to select the best package for the SCADA System to allow the City to have continuity between the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition and the Programmable Logic Controllers to allow better response to issues that may arise including visual representation and Redundant Alarming. The New Rockwell SCADA System is one of the Top Leaders in SCADA Systems and employs a Wireless 900Mhz Telemetry System that communicates to 4 Remote wells and 10 in progress Lift Stations giving seamless control, reporting and alarming to meet the high demand of a growing City. The Wireless system was split into 2 Radio Systems to allow separation and expandability to 10x the current size. The selected SCADA architecture was the Rockwell Automation Factory Talk View SE Distributive Server/Client System. This system allows us to house the Server at a local area in the facility so that clients may connect on the SCADA Ethernet network. The city has 4 local Clients with 2 remote clients connected over Fiber at the Domestic Water Pump Station touch panel PC and another at the Remote Elevated South Tank for DOC. All SCADA system Components have multi-level password authentication so that only the people with Administrative rights can change critical points. Alarming is always a big concern in a System so we designed the primary alarm system to be an Antx Hardware autodialer system as it communicates directly with the PLC and uses conventional telephone lines and a secondary Aquavx cellular dialer located local to the remote stations to server as a redundant backup due to communication loss from the SCADA system.
The City partnered in a new R&D project to develop a new level of Control/Accessibility through Apples Ipad2 and Cisco secure technology to develop a hand held solution for operators to securely view their SCADA system in the field over a 3G Verizon Service giving the operator the ability to respond to Alarms immediately and minimizing overflow situations among other alarm conditions. This concept was a spin-off of the already proven Laptop and Smart Phone solution utilized in newer plants today. The City wanted to enable IP based traffic from outside network sources (ipad, Laptop, Smart Phone) but not combine their high traffic internal network and Internet trafic, so a network separation was established at the source through Cisco Firewall Technology keeping the process control network separate.