Scada for Italian railways

July 2005 SCADA/HMI

The state run Italian Railways needed an open source code supervisory system that could supervise traffic control, perform diagnostics and maintenance, make information available to the public, and handle the security and communications.

This was won by Tecnomatix, punting its FactoryLink scada system. The model that was proposed and accepted comprised a three-tier system with seven command centres at the top of the tier. These command centres have a realtime overview of active information. They also have the ability to 'zoom in' on any particular area of interest and to issue overriding commands to correct a situation.

The second tier constitutes the individual train stations with a total of 1300 servers running a Unix platform. These servers gather and process all the information relevant to that particular station and according to predetermined priority, send it either to the command centres or, have it available to authorised users.

Each server has between two and three clients. These make up the third tier, which constitutes the operator stations with a total of 3000 clients. State of the art reporting modules enables users to instantly understand trends and tendencies in the operational knowledge they collect from these managed processes.

The true OPC architecture of FactoryLink significantly reduced time spent on integration with the result that the Command & Control System was online much earlier than anticipated. The groundbreaking work that was done between Italian Railways and Technomatix has prompted other countries to adopt similar models, not just for their railway systems, but for airports as well.

For more information contact Johan de Villiers, Process & Information Technologies, 012 664 6622, [email protected]

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