SCADA and electrical design are engineering disciplines with overlaps when it comes to systems design, operational management and maintenance services. Performing one element of design without consideration for other aspects of the “system” can lead to unnecessary operational or capital costs.

One important way to mitigate this risk is to manage contractors against standards, particularly standards which have been developed based on organisational experience and which have intrinsic value to the organisation. Simply, these standards may include preferences in the selection of products, reference general industry standards and provide details about the quality and provisions when tendering work by external contractors. These standards also provide a basis for internal staff engaged to design, improve, specify or maintain operational assets.

Ideally the organisation engineering standards used to manage operational assets are maintained and reflect important operational criteria. This paves the way for a degree of alignment when contractors need to transition their work with minimal disruption to establish operational practice.

In January 2015 work began on updating East Gippsland Water’s General Specification documents including SCADA. The purpose of the consultancy service work was to include new sections and cross check that pre-existing information was relevant and correlated with new additions.

egw water storage

The areas included in the additions were;

  • Remote access communications and local on-site communications.
  • Solar power
  • Standard components (PLCs, power meters)
  • Process control (HMI, SCADA, Telemetry, pump controllers)
  • Enterprise Information Systems (data acquisition)
  • Telecommunications
  • Sewer Pump Station requirements (cubicle construction, control method, backup control, minimum IO required)
  • Water Pump Station requirements (cubicle construction, control method, backup control minimum typical IO for Pumps, Reservoirs, Tanks PRV’s, etc)

The review process included an evaluation of other remaining technical sections to ensure electrical information was relevant to current practice.

For any additions or changes to a total system design or a specification which is representative of a design concept, the last compliance review is imperative to ensure overall coherency and remove any chance of technical contradiction.

This assignment by the Parasyn consultancy team required a lot of collaboration with EGW and was completed in October 2015.

Customer comment “Gordon is a winner”

Model Predictive Control emulates plant operation

 

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