The primary responsibility at water and wastewater plants is maintaining compliance while minimizing operating costs. The primary costs have always been power, people, and chemicals. Traditional SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) has been used in water and wastewater plants for decades, but is the cost and expertise required to maintain these systems really worth it?
The EdgeScout by RRAMAC hosted data collection and remote monitoring and reporting system may be a better solution. EdgeScout by RRAMAC will:
- Allow operators to quickly act upon critical alerts from their smart phone
- Reduce cyber security threats thru a managed security system with full audit trails
- Monitor and control energy costs
- Optimize chemical usage
- Reduce onsite chemical inventory
- Maximize system availability thru predictive maintenance
- Maximize the availability of data collection and reporting systems
- Drastically reduce the cost and complexity of maintaining a traditional SCADA system
*Example of an annual water consumption report with breakdowns by month and by individual stations
Initial Cost
For an EdgeScout hosted solution, you simply install an edge node near the controller and pay a small onetime setup fee. Data is pushed to a secure data center maintained by RRAMAC. Compare this to purchasing PCs and SCADA licenses and hiring someone to install, program, configure, and troubleshoot the system. Additional fees may be required for reporting software licenses, operating system licenses, virus protection, fees for each user, additional fees for mobile access, data backups, redundancy, and a UPS.
Software Subscription Fees
EdgeScout’s hosted solution requires a small annual subscription that covers data storage, support, user access, and system maintenance. For a SCADA system you will need to pay for software upgrades and for the OS and virus software at a minimum in order to protect the system from cyber threats. Each time you do this, you may need to also purchase upgrades to the rest of your software for compatibility with the OS changes. None of that is required with EdgeScout because maintaining up to date software for the OS and applications is RRAMAC’s responsibility and is included in the subscription.
Reliability
In most SCADA systems a network failure, PC failure, printer failure, can prevent you from printing required reports. There is no single point of failure when using EdgeScout to collect data and create reports.
EdgeScout servers are configured for redundancy with backup power generation and offsite backups. The edge nodes at the water or wastewater locations collect time stamped data from the control system and can buffer data for days or weeks if the network goes down. Reports are generated and stored by the EdgeScout server and can be accessed at any time.
Cyber Security
A PC or server located at a water or wastewater facility is far less secure than a server at a data center. PCs require upgrades which usually means downloading software over the internet, or plugging in removable media. Both of these are potential security threats. A qualified and dedicated IT group can certainly handle these tasks, but IT are usually not the only people with physical access to these systems.
EdgeScout servers are located in a data center with controlled physical access and maintained and accessed by RRAMAC IT experts.
Software Support
Software Support is included in the RRAMAC annual asset subscription. If there is a software error in the system, RRAMAC’s software group identifies and fixes the issue before customers are even aware of the problem.
SCADA support contracts simply give the user the right to contact the SCADA company via phone or email. They may be able to guide you to diagnosing the problem, but fixing it is usually up to plant maintenance or a hired integrator.
PC and OS obsolescence
PCs and operating systems become obsolete sooner or later. Replacing the PC and/or operating system is a huge expense for water wastewater plants that often are trying to keep a new installation running for many years.
This is not an issue for an EdgeScout hosted system. OS upgrades are performed by RRAMAC and with redundant servers there is typically little or no interrupted service.
Information and Control at Your Fingertips
Operators and maintenance personnel are rarely sitting at a desk or standing at a control panel, so critical alerts need to come to them. The EdgeScout remote monitoring solution provides text and email alerts to notify operators when there is an issue that requires their attention. The alert message can include live links to view the status of the faulted equipment, turn on a pump, or order a replacement part. EdgeScout allows the operator to make real-time decisions with the remote monitoring app.
Chemical Remote Monitoring and Reordering
Running out of treatment chemicals results in quality or compliance issues, but maintaining excess inventory is expensive. EdgeScout not only lets you monitor chemical tank levels to provide alerts, but can tie into your ordering system to trigger refill orders.
Historical usage rates can be calculated to estimate the run out date for each chemical. Artificial intelligence can be incorporated to factor in the impact of weather on chemical usage and adjust usage predictions based on weather forecasts.
Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance can be as simple as measuring vibration and current on pumps, but with changing flow rates, the current and vibration measurement will vary.
EdgeScout servers can provide normalization calculations to adjust these alarm thresholds. EdgeScout can also incorporate artificial intelligence to analyze patterns from multiple sensors in order to improve the predictions of any pending failures.
For more information about implementing a remote monitoring system within your water wastewater plant, contact the experts at RRAMAC Connected Systems.
