Case study: Water filtration plant automation

This project, completed over three years from 2011 to 2014, included an automation program for 121 water filtration plants.

Scope:

• Provided automation design and integration services for 121 water filtration plants islandwide.
• Developed robust and complete programmable logic controller programs that will allow this aqueduct and sewer authority to operate the plants remotely.
• Worked with plant operators to transform the operational organization to ease the change from the current manual plant operation to a modern technology-based organization that can operate a plant remotely.
• Worked in two parallel tracks: restructuring while building automation capability.

Input/output density: 121 sites with an average of 800 I/O point that is equivalent to 96,800 I/O points.

Complexity: Standard simple process in multisite facilities with aging facilities with some level of variation on process and control architecture and diverse projects in concurrent execution.

Resources: Project management and design team, programming standardization and test team and implementation team.

Challenges:

• Existing infrastructure with many automation legacy systems.
• Project team conformed by several organizations:
  • CDM Smith program management team, design team and lead integration team.
  • Process control supplier in charge of panels, instrumentation and installation. A process control supplier is the denomination of a contractor or vendor that commonly provide control panels, instrumentation and integration services.
  • Supervisory control and data acquisition vendor integrator responsible of corporate data integration.
  • Application system provider contractor responsible for human machine interface
  • Application system provider contractor in charge of application deployment and commissioning.
• Several levels of variation on the filtration process and control system.
• Geographically distributed work site, some with difficult access.
• Changes in scope and schedule constraints.

Success factors:

• Conformation of project management, design and integration team with vast experience on water filtration projects.
• Develop standards library for PLC and SCADA applications that fit all applications through a parametrizable setting.
• Filtration plants were organized by clusters to simplify management and operation.
• Execution of a thorough project management process with five phases:
  • Preconstruction tasks.
  • Hardware readiness.
  • Startup readiness.
  • Endorsement and approval.

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