Missouri-American Water supplies 350,000 customers in St. Louis and St. Charles Counties with 400 million of gallons of water a day. Up-to-the minute monitoring of its four water treatment plants and more than 50 distribution sites is essential in ensuring the 4,200-mile distribution system’s integrity and complying with EPA and other government regulations.

The company’s Unix-based Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system installed in the 80's was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. The water supplier decided it was time to upgrade to a new state-of-the-art system using Windows 2003 Server, MS SQL Server, and Iconics Genesis 32 and BizViz software, utilizing .NET technology.

The Solution

Because downtime is not an option when supplying water to a city, the system needed to be extremely reliable and include multiple levels of redundancy. Factor that in, along with eight servers, 15 work stations, and more than 100 PLCs spread out over an extensive geographic area, and you've got a rather complex system.

Redundancy was included at various levels including PLC communication paths, I/O data servers, security servers, application servers, and databases and data storage. This requirement increased the system’s complexity in terms of synchronization and distribution of configurations, programs and data throughout the system. The McEnery Automation team worked extensively with software suppliers and the customer to develop a system architecture that would meet the goals.

On-line testing of more than 400 graphic screens was not an option, so an extensive simulation process was used to verify every screen object before installation.

The Results

The project was implemented with no downtime at any of the water treatment plants and no disruption in service to the company’s customers.

The new system provides increased performance, security and reliability, while utilizing current software and technology that will be easier for their staff to maintain and support.

 
©2001 McEnery Automation