Wessex Water migrates to new SCADA system

Wessex Water, a UK-based water and sewrage company, has completed the migration of new Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system.

The migrating of the SCADA system was part of a technology framework agreement signed with Siemens in 2010.

The new system would enable Wessex Water to control and monitor its capital programme using Siemens, WinCC SCADA, HMI and communications products.

For this migration project Wessex Water’s engineering and construction in-house automation team has worked with Siemens technical support staff  to develop a standard PLC software, standard software / hardware interfaces, standard SCADA / HMI configurations, for Siemens fixed and variable speed drives and standard control system architectures.

The scheme was given approval for replacing legacy SCADA systems on 23 of Wessex Water’s clean and waste water sites.

Wessex Water has selected WinCC for replacing existing SCADA solution, which enabled the water and sewrage company to add AMP5 / AMP 6 capital schemes as well as provided a common SCADA platform across 40 of its largest sites.

Wessex Water Technical and Development manager – Automation Dave Mining said: “Our legacy SCADA hardware, software and operating systems could no longer be properly supported.

“In addition it was not possible to accommodate any expansion of site control and monitoring systems within the legacy SCADA systems. Clearly this represented an unacceptable business risk.”

The migration to new systems was completed after nearly 18 month time period.

The migration process included re-drafting of nearly 2,000 mimics and approximately 100,000 tags. The conversion of Mimics was done using the existing smart faceplates of Wessex Water and were further developed and extended to increase the efficiency of the conversion.

The migration to new SCADA system helped Wessex Water in achieving a number of strategic goals, including the use of centrally managed authentication to the SCADA systems, making it easy to add, remove or change staff access.