June 2017System Integration & Control Systems Design
By Steven Meyer, editor, SA Instrumentation and Control.
The subject projects of this year’s Scada Review are a worthy reflection of the effort put in by the respondent end-users, SIs and vendors. It is encouraging to see that even in these times of depressed confidence and political uncertainty there are world-class projects being engineered by South African companies across a broad range of industrial sectors.
Insight in the detail
We remind readers that the value of the scada reviews is not always about the capabilities of the scada product – it may be about how the project has been engineered or managed, an innovative system architecture or the adoption of certain standards. This year’s reviews contain details of all of these and more.
In print we feature each vendor’s response, which we have edited to meet space constraints. In order to prevent such editing from keeping valuable information from readers, we have published the full-length questionnaire responses online. For readers’ convenience, we have provided a link to the full-length article at the end of each printed review.
Our subject projects
The subject of Schneider’s submission is a mining application in the North West province. The project described is an upgrade from a legacy system to Citect Scada 2015. This was done in order to standardise objects and templates across all plant sections, while also consolidating all plant sections into a single system.
Highlights of Adroit’s submission on a wastewater project include the installation of a system to monitor and control a new plant in Swaziland. The primary requirement was for a scada system capable of monitoring and controlling the pump stations and reacting to alarms. The system integrators were impressed by how easy it was to scale and modify the architecture and how the Adroit solution reduced the engineering time significantly through standard equipment units and faceplates. The end user was impressed by the standard logging and alarming capabilities.
Wonderware’s subject project involved the consolidation of pre-existing legacy control systems spanning the site of a mining operation in Carletonville, into one centrally managed system based on Wonderware System Platform. The brief was to implement one automated energy control system across all operations, which could perform automated load shifting as well as automated load clipping. A major requirement was that the entire control system and schedules be manageable from a central point.
Thank you
On behalf of our readers, we thank the end-users, SIs and vendors for their efforts in comprehensively completing our 2017 scada questionnaire, for sharing their expertise and experience, and continuing to expand the knowledge base of the C&I industry in South Africa.
Notes:
1. The order of appearance of reviews is the order in which they were received by SA Instrumentation and Control.
2. Some reviewer responses have been edited due to space and comprehension considerations.
3. A 'No' or 'N/A' response to a question in the project-specific responses does not necessarily mean that the scada system lacks that feature; only that the feature was not implemented in, or not applicable to, the subject project.
4. Where a respondent has not answered a question or has answered off topic that response has been omitted.
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While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained herein, the publisher and its agents cannot be held responsible for any errors contained, or any loss incurred as a result. Articles published do not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers. The editor reserves the right to alter or cut copy. Articles submitted are deemed to have been cleared for publication. Advertisements and company contact details are published as provided by the advertiser. Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or veracity of supplied material.
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