Water Pump Stations
DataHub Use Case
In a multi-billion-dollar upgrade to the water supply system of a major North American city, DataHub software was chosen to provide secure connectivity between the SCADA systems at each remote pump station and the central offices of the utility.
In the first stage of the project, a DataHub instance was installed at each remote location, and connected by OPC DA to the SCADA system there at that station. Each of those DataHub instances were then connected in turn to the central office. The data flow from the stations to the central office was configured to be outbound-only, which prevents any data being sent back to the remote pump stations.
With data from all pump stations coming into a central DataHub instance, they were able to use it in a number of ways. Selected data from each station was logged to a database, using the Database feature. An additional DataHub instance was installed in the IT department to mirror and bridge the data to other OPC servers running there.
In the next phase of the project, the utility company configured new tunnel connections between each of the remote pumping stations to allow them to share data amongst themselves. This way each station was informed of the general conditions of the whole system, and if one station dropped its performance, other stations would become aware in real time, and could quickly adjust their output as needed.
A final phase of the project was to implement redundancy. Some of the remote locations had two, redundant SCADA systems. By configuring a separate connection for each system to the central DataHub instance, the system engineers were able to use the DataHub Redundancy feature to switch connections whenever the active one went down.
