Products 4 Automation in the UK is highlighting how its Progea Movicon 11 SCADA can provide remote control of integrated water facilities over large areas, with real time visualisation, access and control, via Movicon’s web client
The project that illustrates these features was recently undertaken by the Acque S.p.A. Group, which manages integrated water services for the Valdarno Basso region in the heart of Tuscany, Italy. Comprising five provinces, the Valdarno Basso region is home to 720,000 inhabitants served by 57 local councils: it has 2,500km of waterways and 150 water purifying plants.
The Movicon 11-based control and monitoring system was initially developed, tested and proven with the most well known water boards in the region. It was setup with 26 remote workstations, supported by hosting stations and data refining operations to guarantee supervision and working of the whole system in all conditions at all times, allowing the monitoring and immediate intervention of any suspect event for complete analysis and rectification.
Communication within the Acque S.p.A.project is structured on local networks and an intranet network using PCs with multi-client-server configurations. Each controlled area is connected to field RTUs via radio or GPRS, and data is stored locally in MySQL databases in two hot- backup redundant servers. The process is controlled both locally and remotely from a ‘General Remote Control Centre’ where data is gathered from all areas and stored in the redundant servers and displayed externally in a controlled access area. This functionality is replicated in the field to guarantee process continuity, and also in the control room to maintain information accuracy across the whole infrastructure.
The redundancy management in Movicon is completely integrated and guarantees automatic secondary system intervention. The system has PC workstations connected in a network, based on TCP/IP, with primary and secondary server functions. The primary server manages the plant under normal working conditions, maintaining complete control by communicating and gathering data from the plant. Any anomaly, malfunction or error in the correct running of this station causes the secondary station to automatically take over control.
The secondary server manages the plant in redundancy mode under normal working conditions, through the shared variable memory areas. This station is capable of interacting with plant independently and has the same identical data storing system found in the primary server: it is always on standby to take over from the primary to automatically manage the plant whenever any anomaly occurs.
When restored into operation, the primary immediately synchronises and restores all current historical log statuses and alarm situations with its own data, so no data is lost.
Thanks to Movicon’s integrated web client technology, Acque S.p.A personnel can access the plant at anytime, anywhere, using a standard Internet browser to 
display technological information, and interact when and where necessary. Each user has access to display pages according to their accredited user level, independently of any other users logged on at the same time. The system can, therefore, be accessed with remote control whenever needed to quickly analyse acquired data.
The Movicon alarm management function provides notification of the most important events to on-call duty personnel by telephone. These personnel are equipped with portable PCs for accessing the remote control system via the web client to monitor system information. Thanks to this system, the managerial staff can get a clear and immediate picture of all situations at all times, in order to react immediately when necessary, reducing breakdown times to a minimum.
