Project: Baton Rouge Wastewater Pump Station SCADA System (November 29, 2005)

By Control Engineering Staff November 29, 2005

November 29, 2005

With a short work week last week, we focused on moving things along with Phase I of the project. We made a request to the primary engineering consultant to add a vendor to the Phase I RTU and HMI solicitation. In our September meeting, we agreed with the client and consultant that an Ethernet vs. Modbus architecture would be preferred. This decision is pointing us toward some considerably different hardware and software.

We have experience building systems using every PLC and specialty pump controller product the city has ever considered. Based on our experience, we chose to do our own RTU/HMI evaluation and tested the most promising products with our system, so as not to find ourselves without a solution that both we and the client could live with. The testing demonstrated our chosen solution offers considerably more functionality for the customer than specified, at about the same price level. It will be interesting to see how the primary consultant’s evaluation compares to our own.