Tell me about GIS and SCADA

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Thread Starter

Nathan Boeger

I hear lots of great things about both raster and vector based GIS systems. Integrators dealing with municipalities in particular have brought this up. I guess you can see cool maps with overlays of: underground pipes, wiring, zoning, buildings, equipment, etc. I've seen topographical images. I guess you can even input (raster based) aerial/satellite photos into the system.

How much of this does your current SCADA package support? Does it adhere to the OGC standard?
http://www.opengeospatial.org/
How much should the SCADA package support? What am I missing about GIS in general? TIA,

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Nathan Boeger
http://www.inductiveautomation.com
"Design Simplicity Cures Engineered Complexity"
 
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Our organization is currently developing a new SCADA system and have decided that connectivity to our GIS system is an important goal. We will be monitoring and controlling various aspects of our water and sewer utilties through this SCADA system and would like to be able to link data collected by SCADA to map features.

Our asset management system is GIS based and so we already have many of our assets mapped. It's simply a matter of identifying the "tags" in the SCADA system in such a way that they correspond to our map features. We hope to be able to autogenerate work orders based upon events or alarms monitored by SCADA. Also, data logged by the SCADA system should enable spatial based analysis.

For example, we would like to be able to determine inflow and infilstration (I/I) experienced by an individual sanitary sewer lift station. We have our lift stations mapped and will be developing lift station service area polygons. We also have water meters mapped and linked to water consumption information from our utility billing system. Linking SCADA to GIS will enable us to tie pump run times for the lift station and analyze flow pumped. If we can then compare water system usage for the same period we can determine how much additional flow has been experienced by the lift station above and beyond what one would expect from potable water consumption (you do need to control for watering of yards and other water use that would not normally go down the drain). Identifying individual lift stations which experience significant I/I will allow us to target our sanitary sewer main capital improvements better. In other words, its about more than just putting together cool maps.

We are finding that many integrators have never heard of GIS and while I am aware of some locations that have linked GIS and SCADA it is something that appears to be on the client end and not because the software companies are working together to establish standards and practices for this.

As to open sharing of SCADA information, I think that most utilities would be reluctant to place data from their SCADA systems on a location that folks can have free access to. However, SCADA and GIS should be able to be an interactive tool for them to use within their organization.
 
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Nathan Boeger

Dan,
Thanks for the great info. I have a few questions/comments?

-What asset management system are you using?

-What (GIS) data do/can you enter besides either (vector based) coordinates or (raster based) images?

"Linking SCADA to GIS will enable us to tie pump run times for the lift station and analyze flow pumped" How does GIS fit here? It seems to me that tying pump run times to your SCADA system is what is allowing that analysis. Am I missing something?

"As to open sharing of SCADA information, I think that most utilities would be reluctant to place data from their SCADA systems on a location that folks can have free access to". The "Open" that I was referring to is OGC - an open standard for GIS. It's referring to how the SCADA software implements its GIS piece - NOT open sharing of your data.

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Nathan Boeger
http://www.inductiveautomation.com
"Design Simplicity Cures Engineered Complexity"
 
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Nathan - We are using Cityworks by Azteca Systems for asset management. We have a very extensive GIS dataset for water, sewer, street, traffic, storm sewer, municipal planning and other purposes.

Regarding how GIS will add to our ability to analyze lift station data I'm talking about taking advantage of some basic GIS capabilities to link lift station pump run times to water consumption for a given geographic area so we can analyze inflow and infiltration.

In a standard database you need to have data classified according to varying categories to run a query. For example, if you want to know what the billed water consumption is for a particular neighborhood you would need to have a field in the dataset that identifies that particular account as belonging to to that neighborhood.

We have linked our water accounts billed consumption data to property parcels. This gives us the ability to query water consumption in our GIS system based upon criteria we would generally not design into a standard water billing system (e.g., zoning classification, council ward, etc.). We plan to build a map layer that identifies collection areas for each sanitary sewer lift station. Overlaying the lift station coverage area against the property parcels allows us to analyze water consumption for each lift station for a given period of time.

Pump run times are maintained in the SCADA system. Linking that pump run time to the lift stations represented in our GIS system allows us to do some basic infiltration and inflow analysis for each sewer lift station because we can compare how much sewer flow is going through the lift station compared to water consumption in that same geographic area.

In this example, none of the actual data is actually stored in the GIS system. You are pulling data from the SCADA systema and comparing it to data from the utility billing system using GIS data tools. Does that make sense?

Dan
 
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Nathan Boeger

Dan,

The idea makes sense. Some of the specifics seem a bit abstract. I need to learn more about GIS from an end user perspective to get a clear idea of exactly how this is implemented. I'll check into Cityworks as well.

It sounds like you have a GIS database/dataset that you use to run SCADA based queries against, affording you a wide range of flexibility.

I've very impressed with you system. Thanks for sharing the details.

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Nathan Boeger
http://www.inductiveautomation.com
"Design Simplicity Cures Engineered Complexity"
 
Dear Sir,

I want to develop a model integrating
3D
Scada
Web-Gis.
Kindly guide which platform/software to use that can integrate the above.

Thanks
Akansha

p.s: kindly give me your mailing address. mine is [email protected]. i would prefer to be contacted off-list
 
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