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Overview:
Brisbane Water (BW) is a Division of Brisbane City Council (BCC) which operates sewage and water infrastructure within the city of Brisbane, servicing over one million residents. Production Branch in BW treat in excess of 320 ML of waste water per day via 12 Citect systems at Waste Water Treatment Plants (WWTP's) scattered throughout Brisbane and outlying areas.
Citect has played a major part in the WWTP control systems since first being installed in the mid 1990's at the Oxley Creek WWTP. The success of the initial site was the basis for future Citect SCADA installations throughout Brisbane Water.
In late 2000 Brisbane Water identified that a complete analysis of the current WWTP control systems was required to outline deficiencies with the current system, and to identify new methodologies to assist Brisbane Water in providing a state-of-the-art SCADA system.
Previous SCADA Installation:
The main problem faced by BW was the remote isolation of each of these sites - access and sharing of plant information was slow and labor intensive, with visits to site required to observer plant operation and collect information to be bought back to the office for analysis. Considering that Brisbane covers an area 50km wide, travel times of over 1 hour each way were quite common. This isolation problem, and the unfortunate lack of HMI standards for contracted companies programming PLC and SCADA systems, had resulted in each site having different methodologies of design and programming (e.g. operating systems, Citect versions, tagnames, templates etc). Trying to administer differently configured sites also proved difficult with in-depth familiarization required for the simplest change.
Project Implementation:
Overcoming the location isolation problem was the first step in bringing Plant Information into the boardroom. All computers were upgraded to Windows 2000 and a SCADA Wide Area Network (SWAN) was created using the existing corporate BCC networks on a separate 'IP tunnel' to prevent interference with existing corporate networks.
All local PLC's were also connected to the SWAN to allow remote debugging by BW Support staff. Citect Internet Display Client (IDC) licenses were purchased and installed at each WWTP Citect site, allowing numerous IDC PC's in BCC offices across Brisbane access to real time data and trends. A custom VB Application was created (EasyIDC) which provides a single-click connection to the desired treatment plant.
Under BW's Citect Gold Membership, all sites were upgraded to Version 5.50. A staged re-write of all sites was done after an extensive development of BW Citect Standards which included a 'BWInclude' project compromising standard templates, symbols, and tag naming conventions. As sites were upgraded from earlier versions they were re-written to comply with the new BW Standards.
A SQL Citect project was developed which updates alarm tag information from each of the 11 remote site to a centralized SQL server, which has a Citect front end for seamless integration into the SCADA. A centralized Citect Plant-2-Business server was installed to collect information and store in Oracle data repository, with a training Citect project was developed to assist staff in operation and navigation of the new SCADA systems.
The project took 2 years to complete, with the final site being finished late 2005.
Future Directions:
Currently Brisbane Water is in the process of upgrading to Citect v7.20. The Luggage Point WWTP upgrade will form the basis of the upgraded Citect projects which will then be rolled out to other sites along with Win7x64 Operating system upgrades. This will be staged over the next 12 months.