Success Story: Water

I. CUSTOMER ENVIRONMENT / PROJECT CONTEXT

Customer profile:

Midtfyns Vandforsyning was established in 1893, under the name Ringe Vandaerk. From the beginning, it was the customers of the plant who owned it. Up until today, Midtfyens Vandforsyning has merged with 10 other plants in the local area and recently added their own department for maintaining the network of water pipes. The company supplies fresh drinking water to approximately 6,000 customers and has 8 employees.

The project was executed by Grene Industri-Service, a System Integrator and long-time Telemecanique/ Schneider customer.

Customer objective and constraints:

The customer was seeking a system to control and monitor the remote installation of its pumping and water distribution station that has a capacity of 32,000 m3/day.

•  The old installation was based on a TSX7 platform running on XTEL software. Since this platform was obsolete, the customer wanted to migrate to a more modern platform, using Ethernet technology as the basic mean of communication.
•  All communication should be fully based on Transparent Ready using ASDL Internet.

II. SOLUTION IMPLEMENTATION

Implementation methodology (main phases):

•  Concept & Design
•  Application Software & Hardware Development
•  Testing
•  Commissioning
•  Finalization

Duration:

•  The project began in 2004 and was completed in 2007.

Solution overview (services, products, systems, architectures...):

Schneider Electric provided a solution that split the project into several phases in order to ensure that the daily supply of water to customers would not be impacted. The first task was to convert the old application running in the TSX7 automation equipment to a combination of Modicon M340 & Premium, based on the Unity software platform.  Thanks to the migration capabilities of the Modicon PLC range, it was possible to reuse the existing PLC program by converting PL7-3 to Unity. This migration path enabled significant savings in terms of testing and commissioning and converted roughly 95% of the program.

The second task was to alter the communication to the pumping stations. Relying on "leased lines," the old system was very high-priced and had slow performance. The new structure is based on standard ASDL lines, supplied by a telephone company, to eliminate these problems.

The final task was to migrate to a new monitoring system. Vijeo Citect was chosen per the customer's request to use a "single vendor system." Instead of converting the old system, it was rebuilt from the start to prepare for further developments in the future.

III. RESULTS / ACHIEVEMENT

Customer benefits:

•   95% program conversion saved money and time.
•  Provided a single source for the complete package (PLC & SCADA).
•  Extensive testing and commissioning were avoided by reusing the existing PLC code.
•  Simplified communication via implementation of Internet technology.
•  Synergy with other offers: Modicon Premium and M340, Vijeo Citect, Advantys STB and TeSys-U.

Schneider Electric differentiating values VS competitors:

•  SE's offer focused on a migration of the PL&-3 code , which no other company could offer, thus eliminating any competition.
•  The strong partnership between SE and Grene Industr-Service provided extensive know-how in this segment.