SCADA and the Water Industry

This page contains some general information about technological directions for SCADA in the Water Industry.

The extent to which SCADA can be deployed in a water utility will depend on the economics of SCADA, and the availability of adequate technical solutions. SCADA equipment is routinely utilised for control systems but these are often point to point links, with no information being brought back to a central point.

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Index

Overview

Zone method of operation

Justification of SCADA systems

Some SCADA Cartoons

Rhodes' Corollary to Hoare's Law:
Inside every complex and unworkable program is a useful subroutine struggling to be free.

There are two categories of SCADA systems required in a water utility utility. The first type are those relatively large projects such as those installed in large cities to monitor and control the Trunk Main Distribution network. These are "traditional" SCADA systems, characterised by large budgets, custom design, and a dedicated communications system. The small distances mean it is feasible to rely on the availability of the communications network, and therefore they often utilise a polling protocol, in which all field sites (RTU's) are continuously scanned by the central master.

The second type are those that will be installed in more rural areas and over greater distances. These are lower budget systems (they don't have the customer base to support expensive SCADA projects). If the scope covers a number of towns then any communications system installed must be shared with other users (data AND perhaps voice). A high degree of standardisation is required to cut costs in order for these to be economical, and also it is often necessary for these systems to be installed in stages over time (perhaps by a number of different vendors). There may be large distances involved and these systems must be designed to operate stand-alone in the event of failure of the communications system back to a (very) remote central master. If they will not run standalone, then the control will fail and the town may run out of water. This stand alone requirement implies the RTU's must be able to talk to each other (peer to peer), and have a degree of sophistication to enable planned control strategies to be implemented at the RTU level.

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