Major reform of water services in the Republic of Ireland includes implementation of a centralised telemetry system that will help manage thousands of assets, writes Alan Cunningham, software delivery manager at Ovarro.
Uisce Éireann (formerly Irish Water) is undertaking major reform of water services in the Republic of Ireland, having moved from a 31 local authority structure to a single national utility.
The utility is now delivering a National Telemetry Programme, which involves the implementation of a new National Telemetry System to support centralised and standardised asset monitoring activities and interconnect previously disparate systems. This will enable remote monitoring and management, and data collection and analysis for over 2,000 water and wastewater assets.
Having a central telemetry system linked to one operations management centre will also support critical asset oversight, incident management, troubleshooting and strategic planning.
The solution
Ovarro’s SCOPE SCADA telemetry solution was selected by Uisce Éireann (UÉ) to provide a central system for operational oversight and management of the water and wastewater networks, including supply and treatment, and to support areas such as leakage detection and respond to alerts in real-time.
SCOPE – Secure Configurable Online Process Executive – is a supervisory system that allows companies to monitor a range of assets in real-time and includes configuration tools for dataloggers and remote telemetry units (RTUs).
Ovarro was contracted to deliver and support the system. The UÉ requirements meant that significant SCOPE enhancement development was necessary to deliver the desired functionality.
Ovarro engineers, supported by UÉ and its wider team of contractors, installed the system onto server computers hosted across multiple datacentres. The collaborative team then successfully carried out Site Acceptance Testing comprising functional and resilience elements.
In the field, Ovarro’s Seprol S2000 RTUs are currently being installed to connect Uisce Éireann’s operational sites to SCOPE.
The Seprol RTUs are set up to operate within the Water Industry Telemetry Standards (WITS), a standard communications protocol used across the water industry. Protocols are common languages that allow centralised telemetry systems to communicate with RTUs on a remote site.
There are large number of legacy RTUs remaining in use across the UÉ region, operating under a legacy proprietary protocol. Ovarro implemented protocols within SCOPE to facilitate reliable communications between the devices and SCOPE, that were proven as part of the Site Acceptance Testing.
Outcome
Ovarro has delivered a central SCOPE system and is being used to monitor operational sites to be migrated over from legacy monitoring systems.
The SCOPE system was built in line with the IEC62443 standard of the International Electrotechnical Commission, meeting a high bar in cybersecurity, and interfaces with a number of other Uisce Éireann systems.
Telemetry, SCADA and associated real-time systems are an essential component of a centralised utility model, providing real-time monitoring and control as well as asset performance information for business decision-making. As a company, we are proud to have provided Uisce Éireann with the SCOPE suite of software, which is enabling central monitoring of assets across the entire country for the first time.
John Flaherty, operational technology manager at Uisce Éireann IT, said: “Implementation of the new National Telemetry System is a major project that will deliver significant operational improvements for Uisce Éireann and its customers.
“Historically Irish Water – now Uisce Éireann – and the local authorities relied on telemetry systems that were inhibited by a lack of a single set of standards, varying data communications systems and individual county-based control centres.
“Effective telemetry will provide technology which enables remote monitoring and management, and data collection and analysis for thousands of assets. SCOPE from Ovarro is key to linking the new telemetry system to the National Operations Management Centre and will support critical oversight, operations management and planning.”
