Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition

-Incuity Software, Inc., a leading developer of real-time business intelligence (BI) software for manufacturing enterprises, today announced that the City of Santa Rosa (Calif.) Utilities Department has standardized on the company’s Incuity EMI™ software for implementing business intelligence solutions across multiple municipal databases and computing applications used to run city utilities operations.

With a population of more than 150,000 people, Santa Rosa is the county seat of Sonoma County, one of California’s famed wine producing areas. The Utilities Department is responsible for water supply, wastewater and sewer systems for both the city and the subregional wastewater treatment and reclamation system. The department operates three separate supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for managing all of the facilities involved; a laboratory information management system (LIMS); an enterprise asset management system; and systems for managing environmental data collection and reporting to state and federal regulatory agencies.

“Each of these major control and computing systems was created separately over the years as our utilities operations grew, and unfortunately we had to deploy separate data collection, analysis and reporting systems for each,” said John Joyner, Department Technology Coordinator. “Several years ago we started searching for a single solution that would allow us to gather, visualize, analyze and report on data from all of these different sources and databases, but there was no one answer that met our needs and was affordable.

“We’ve now found a solution in Incuity that lets us not only fulfill on our SCADA master plan but takes us to the next level and provides a business intelligence approach that covers all of our Utilities Department operations,” Joyner added. “We’re now configuring applications that will let us blend business and control information from multiple data sources to help our managers make better business decisions. We’ll be able to provide services to the city and the region more efficiently, which should reduce costs so that we can provide more services without increasing budgets. We’ll also optimize and streamline our environmental reporting capabilities so that they represent less of an overhead burden on our operating departments.”

Source and more info: businesswire

Marshalltown, Gauteng: S Africa: UK company, Orthos Projects Ltd has successfully completed a turnkey contract to design and build a new state- of- the- art Greensand preparation plant, part of a complete new casting facility for Scaw Metals, South Africa’s leading producer of high chrome grinding media for the mining industry. The turnkey project, part of Scaw’s multi-million Rand expansion programme in its high chrome foundry, employs a CitectSCADA system to provide plant visualisation and operator interface. In addition, the Citect system has a modem connection allowing remote observation, fault diagnosis and troubleshooting by Orthos technical staff from anywhere in the world.

“We have used CitectSCADA successfully on several of our international foundry projects,” said Alan Piper, Project Engineer for Orthos Projects. “It is an extremely fast and easy-to use system. We like the way it enables us to do just what we need to do, even down to data logging, and the way it expands easily and flexibly as the requirements of our customers grow. A major benefit is that we do not need to purchase development licences for CitectSCADA. This reduces our costs substantially, and also helps our clients, who can make changes to their systems without the added cost of a development system.”

Source and more info: pandct

“The whole fact is that from a software maintenance perspective its seen as a grudge purchase, and users do not understand or perceive the value behind the scene,” says Paul Geng, business development director for scada developers, Adroit Technologies.

“All software companies have to keep in mind the trends that are taking place in the industry and leverage the technology to make it easier for customers and system integrators (SIs) alike.”

A closer look at what goes on behind the scenes may help software users understand the necessity for maintenance fees.

Development houses need to stay abreast of new technologies and adapt these technologies to their customer’s requirements and product lines. This involves a continuous up-skilling of the companies software engineers as changes in technologies come about. The software developers then need to apply the new trends and technologies to make it easily usable for the customers who could benefit from these newer technologies.

Source and more info: instrumentation

This project involves the consolidation of two large control centers located in Madrid and Barcelona, as well as control facilities for three small networks in Southern Italy, into a single facility. The project includes procurement and implementation of a new central SCADA system, along with an off-site backup system which will also serve as a disaster recovery emergency control center. “gasNatural is a long-term customer of UTSI’s Madrid-based branch office. We have been helping them with upgrades and support for its existing systems and networks for several years, and the consolidation of these systems into a single common control center will improve overall system efficiency and reliability, as well as simplify ongoing maintenance and support activities,” stated Daniel Nagala, President of UTSI International Corporation.

Source and more info: earthtimes

New system will monitor and control 56 substations and automation points, integrating a range of systems and applications

FOXBORO, MASSACHUSETTS, USA - November 15, 2006 - Invensys Process Systems has been chosen by Santee Cooper to implement an InFusion-based SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system. The new system will monitor and control 56 substations and automation points located along the company’s Myrtle Beach and Moncks Corner electrical distribution network in eastern South Carolina.

By utilizing highly intuitive object-based concepts in the InFusion Integrated Engineering Environment and InFusion View smart symbol library, the Invensys implementation enables Santee Cooper to smoothly and rapidly deploy the database model and graphics for the new system. Employing the InFusion Application Environment, monitoring and control applications in the new system will include Power Factor Control by switching capacitor banks, to maximize the efficiency of power distribution, driving direct cost savings. The new system will also provide an Enhanced Operator Tagging Support application, for personnel safety at substations that are off-line for maintenance. The InFusion based system will also support traditional SCADA requirements.

Source and more info: automation