Project
Water SCADA Migration
Client
CA Department of Water Resources
Location
Sacramento, CA
Project Overview
The California Department of Water Resources, responsible for operating the nation's largest state-owned water and power generation system, undertook a control system modernization initiative. This project aimed to mitigate system downtime caused by the failures of legacy ARINC SCADA software and hardware. By transitioning to a more robust architecture, the department sought to enhance overall system reliability. The primary objective was to design and implement a solution enabling the Alstom Host SCADA system to receive telemetry from Tetragenics RTUs independently of the ARINC SCADA.
Layline's Role
Layline Automation was commissioned to offer solution recommendations and provide support throughout the design and build phases. The design team was entrusted with identifying the optimal approach to decommissioning the ARINC system, ensuring minimal downtime. This process involved careful consideration of budget constraints and leveraging technologies that were either currently in use or familiar to the team.
Challenges
The design team encountered three primary challenges: minimizing system operation downtime, utilizing consumer off-the-shelf solutions/products (COTS), and adhering to the aggressive ARINC retirement schedule. To ensure minimal downtime, the team devised a deployment plan that facilitated rapid commissioning while relying on an extended burn-in period to bolster operator confidence. Restricted to available COTS, the team ingeniously repurposed an existing protocol driver to enable polling within the new communication path. Additionally, automated processes were developed to convert ARINC databases to the Wonderware SCADA system, thereby accelerating build times.
Solution
Layline's software engineers, solution architects, and controls engineers developed a robust system to modernize the control infrastructure. The ARINC databases, which communicated with the TG RTUs, were processed through a PERL-based conversion script to generate the corresponding Wonderware and Alstom databases. By automating the creation of these input files, the team ensured alignment in IO mapping across systems. The existing TG RTU driver from a previous Wonderware product was repurposed to poll the TG RTUs into the newly established Archestra System Platform (SP) front-end processors. SP then functioned as a translator server, providing telemetry to the Alstom (GE Grid) e-terra SCADA host. Additionally, all build files were validated against a new alarm philosophy and naming standard using a custom-developed application.
