Operational Benefits of Integrated Plant Control, SCADA and Information Management Systems at the City of Chandler, Arizona

摘要

Traditionally, in-plant control, SCADA and information management systems have beenseparate, albeit interrelated architectures in the Municipal Water/Wastewater industry. Users andEngineers alike have defined the functionality required by these systems as so diverse thatattempting to combine them into one integrated environment seemed counterproductive in therecent past.However, open computing hardware combined with more flexible and modular software haschanged the tradition. Single integrated systems, sharing the same real-time and historicaloperational data, can now be provided that enable the typical Municipal end user to control alevel, generate a report, search for an electronic O & M manual, schedule a maintenance workorder and utilize Web-enabled software applications via a Wide Area Network, all from the sameoperator interface workstation.Advances in computing technology over the last 10 years have facilitated this trend towards asingle Human-Machine Interface (HMI) environment for all critical operations in a MunicipalW/WW organization. For example, object-based naming conventions enable consistent real-timeand historical data base access from any HMI, whether PC-based or workstation-based.Traditional control applications such as level control, filter backwash, chemical feed control anddissolved oxygen control can be tightly integrated with Computerized Maintenance ManagementSystems (CMMS), Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Plant Information ManagementSystems (PIMS) for critical information management data access.In addition, differing control architectures can be easily integrated without any loss in systemthroughput or performance. Distributed Control Systems technology once considered tooproprietary to be successfully integrated with PLC-based architecture now support open systemsstandards that allow easy integration.