Project: Baton Rouge Wastewater Pump Station SCADA System (January 24, 2006)

January 24, 2006

One week left to the public access period. We will assume no news is good news and that no one has had any serious problems in accessing the SCADA site. We worked with the city’s IT department last week to open the necessary ports for the engineers and maintenance staff to be able to access the SCADA site from their Web browser. The approval had to undergo a systematic hierarchical process with justifications about the need of doing it and the security issues involved with it. It was a difficult situation for us to get approvals at some levels but patience paid off. The city officials can now successfully access the site from their office computers.

Another important milestone is the ability to access the SCADA site from a Sprint PC phone. The device is an Intel Arm Processor based PC phone with Windows Mobile 5.0 Operating System. We successfully installed the Active X control on the phone to access the SCADA site. The device connects to the Internet using the wireless LAN connection if available or with the cellular connection from Sprint. The success of this connectivity proves our point of providing real time data to the maintenance personnel anytime, anywhere. We also installed Indusoft Web Studio on the phone, which means that we can run a client server application on the phone. This will permit the development of local HMI applications for any control loop at the plant.

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