The Lake Constance Water Supply Association provides a reliable supply of drinking water to four million inhabitants in 320 towns and municipalities by taking water from Lake Constance. The drinking water is produced at Sipplinger Berg and then transported via a pipeline network 1700 kilometres long to the 181 members of the association.
The updating of the process control system to PMSXpro in order to enable the distribution of 125 million cubic metres of drinking water per annum as well as the demand-led storage of nearly 500,000 cubic metres of drinking water in the 29 elevated tanks is being carried out by ME-Automation Projects from Fuldabrück near Kassel, part of the Mitsubishi Electric Group.
Because of the large geographical distances involved, the existing telecontrol stations which number more than 300 are linked to a total of twelve server locations with redundant process servers via IEC protocols (101/104). Spread across the whole of Baden-Württemberg, these process servers are connected to the existing corporate network of the Lake Constance Water Supply Association, thus providing a distributed system architecture for the PMSXpro process control system.
A large-screen video wall as well as multiple operating and monitoring stations are to be installed for the operating personnel in the central control room located at the head office in Stuttgart. Two engineering stations, an archive server and one or more application servers for connecting to the offices are also to be provided in the control room. Each of the six control substations which are manned during the day will be equipped with an operating and monitoring station, enabling it to operate in so-called isolated mode too. The remaining sites will purely be process server locations.
Most remarkable is the use of the PMSXpro process control system, which is configured from ME-Automation Projects, to operate with the existing additional programs that have been used for Lake Constance water supply to date, and will be integrated into the process control system during the course of the project, making them part of PMSXpro. An in-house development department with extremely experienced employees from ME-Automation Projects is currently working on the implementation of these additional programs with a graphical user interface. Examples include balance archive evaluation as well as leak monitoring programs.
