| An integrated approach to telemetry and process control in a regional water company serving a population of over 5 million, spread over an area of 27,000 sq. ㎞, is described. A region-wide telemetry system, believed to be the largest in Europe, has been developed over a ten year period and is currently being upgraded to give improved capacity and performance. The system is required to provide information on over 6,000 operational sites to some 300 users independent of geographic or organisational boundaries. It provides full integration both with the corporate IT structure and the installed base of telemetry and process control outstations. The trend within each of the UK water utilities has been to standardise on a small number of vendors of wide area telemetry and process control systems in order to achieve integration. In author`s company, asingle telemetry systems supplier is employed and three supplies of programmable logic controllers are approved for process control. Intelligent telemetry outstations are also used for process control, where appropriate. A number of control system design options are described where integration of local process controllers with the main telemetry network is carried out via suitable gateway modules which communicate over a common bus system. This modular approach is well suited to the multi-contract, incremental nature of the company`s capital programme and is applicable to any size of control system. By the inclusion of appropriate interface standards within contract documents, much of the physical integration is carried out by the process contractor, ensuring the minimum of delay in the required data, or regional level. The system is increasingly being used to provided added value services and a number of recently completed schemes are described. |
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