Rags to Riches - A Data Story

In 2014 the Waikato District Council (WDC) undertook a project to upgrade their SCADA system to better improve the collection, storage and reporting of compliance data.

Over the past two decades the WDC SCADA system had been growing organically. New sites and equipment were regularly connected to a network reliant upon an analogue radio backbone, already under strain from high-traffic sites such as treatment plants, without regard for knock-on effects. This type of growth was starting to create significant instability in the system and as a result the system was crashing on a regular basis. Each time this occurred compliance data was lost. In addition to the stability issues, the database used to compile the compliance reports was very complex and retrieving data from the database was a time consuming manual process.

To improve the system WDC decided to implement a district wide SCADA system upgrade. The reliance upon the analogue radio system was reduced by moving the major treatment plants off the radio network and onto a 2Mb Spark OneOffice connection. This reduced radio traffic and improving the communication reliability to the remaining sites. At the same time, a new instance of Wonderware’s latest SCADA system ArchestrA was developed and rolled out at both the Councils head office in Ngaruawahia and at each of the seven major treatment plants around the district. This allowed the Council compliance data to be stored in a central database in Ngaruawahia with a common tagging convention. Council also commissioned Water Outlook to provide a user friendly frontend to assist with compliance reporting. To ensure no data was lost, each of the plants was configured with default store / forward functionality enabled. This allows them to store data locally should the OneOffice connection be temporarily unavailable.

Improvements to the SCADA network and implementation of the latest industry software standards has finally placed WDC in a position to audit compliance on a minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day basis and has significantly increased the visibility of critical assets on the network. The upgrades to the system have provided significant improvements in system stability, eliminating missing data and significantly improving the Councils compliance. Looking to the future, WDC is still constantly reviewing ways to improve their SCADA system. The structure of a SCADA system is made up of many layers e.g. SCADA software, radio networks, PLC code, physical wiring, etc. and it takes all these layers working together to produce a successful system. At present Council is working on improving commutation to remote sites including a number of minor treatment plants that are still operating on radio while also building redundancy of communication to critical sites around the district.