Un modern control and supervision system, combined with a solution that guarantees the high availability of the plants and business continuity, make the Jesi and Castelbellino purifiers in the Marches an exemplary case of advanced management of water services.
Multiservizi is one of the main companies responsible for the management of water services in the Marche region. The plants managed by the company belong to a network of aqueducts that extend over 5.200 km, with 2.000 km of sewage network and 41 treatment plants. The users served are 220.000 for a volume of billed water of approximately 28 million cubic meters.
The 41 purification plants managed by Multiservizi treat a total of approximately 42 million cubic meters of waste water of civil and industrial origin. THE main purifiers are those of Ancona, Falconara, Senigallia, Jesi, Fabriano, Camerano and Castelbellino, all larger than 10.000 population equivalent (PE).
The revamping project
At the beginning of the XNUMXs, systems were installed supervision and remote control for four purifiers of great importance for the Marche region in Falconara (11.000.000 m4.500.000), Senigallia (7.000.000 m1.300.000), Iesi (2015 mXNUMX) and Castelbellino (XNUMX mXNUMX). A few years later in XNUMX Multiservizi has decided to proceed with a significant revamping of these plants, to which Matelica and Fabriano will soon be added. “After many years – explains Damiano Brega, manager of the division of General Impianti which is responsible for electrical projects and software development - the hardware on which the supervision and remote control system ran appeared rather dated and, with it, also the SCADA software releases".
Multiservizi therefore decides for a substantial update which involved the replacement of the Host machines, updates of the GE iFix versions from dated versions to version 5.5, updating in some cases of the PLCs with redundant CPU versions, firmware upgrade of the controllers and part replacement of the I/O periphery. The iFIX update to version 5.5 is only temporary: soon the software of the Ancona Terminal Servers will also be updated and then all the machines will switch to the latest 5.8 release.
General Impianti is in charge of maintaining the systems and developing upgrades and applications, the company from which the Loccioni group originated back in the seventies and which today, within this reality, manages automation and plant engineering projects, with a particular focus on projects that have a high environmental impact.
Each of the systems is managed by a PLC which takes care of managing the automation logics, while the supervision and management of the alarms are entrusted to GE iFix, the SCADA of GE distributed and supported in Italy by ServiTecno, which takes care of the logging of data and to offer the operator interface (HMI) which is used both for displaying the system and for configuring the parameters.
As we were saying, PLCs are responsible for carrying out automation functions. They manage all analog and digital input and output signals: they read the status of the system utilities, control the activation of the utilities, acquire the measurements from the sensors, read and control the working frequency of the inverters. Finally they communicate the data to the SCADA (except in the case of Castelbellino, as we will see later) via ethernet interfaces.
Each of the plants has its own SCADA server which manages around 10.000 tags. The server then communicates, via a private Multiservice network, with the Central Terminal Server Client in Ancona, where all the statuses of the various iFix supervisors used by Multiservizi are displayed: not only those for the management of the purification plants, but also those relating to the other services provided by the company.
The plants are manned locally, with the exception of the one in Castelbellino which is remotely managed by Iesi. The Ancona plant operates 24 hours a day and is responsible for both the general supervision and control of the plants when they are not manned on site.
Pay attention to plant availability
While in the plants of Falconara and Senigallia the SCADA servers of the plants are equipped with a cold backup system (GE iFIX runs on one machine and synchronizes periodically with a second backup machine and in the event that the online machine fails, the operator manually switches the backup system), a particularly advanced plant availability management system is in operation in the Iesi treatment plant. In fact, an everRun node was installed here, the Stratus platform dedicated precisely to maximizing plant availability, always distributed and supported by ServiTecno. In this plant there are two physical machines on which SCADA is installed, managed automatically by everRun. Thanks to everRun the system is fault tolerant and is able to operate continuously even in the event of a failure of one of the two hosts: the application in fact operates on two virtual machines. If one machine goes down, the application continues running on the other machine without interruption or data loss. Likewise if a component falls, it is replaced with the working component from the second system. “Since this system came into operation – explains Paolo Pauri, Project Manager of Multiservizi SpA – there was no longer any plant downtime that was attributable to the technological part of the infrastructure".
Furthermore, the Jesi system was also entrusted with the management of the Castelbellino SCADA, which is not manned locally. Thanks to secure communication over the corporate wireless WAN, the data collected by the PLCs operating locally in Castelbellino are transmitted to Iesi, where the hosts host both the SCADA of the local plant and the one dedicated to the Castelbellino purifier. “In this way – says Pauri – we were able to considerably reduce costs, reducing the number of host machines to be purchased and centralizing monitoring operations”.
In Iesi and Castelbellino, fault tolerance does not stop only at the SCADA part, but has also been implemented for local automation. In fact, the PLCs in these two purifiers have also recently been updated and are now equipped with a double CPU that allows redundancy to be managed via software.
In the following two years (therefore already in operation) a system similar to the Iesi-Castelbellino tandem was created for the Fabriano and Matelica purifiers.
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