A General SCADA Application for Water and Wastewater Treatment

Abstract: The average Swede uses 140 liters of water everyday. This combined with the usage in industry means that Swedish municipal water treatment plants produce approximately 900 billion liters of clean and safe drinking water every year. This does not include the fact that all water flowing to a treatment plant needs to be treated before being sent back out into the environment. These facts hint at what a huge scale these processes operate at. Furthermore this needs to happen every hour of every day, 365 days a year. So how can these processes be monitored to ensure that everything works as intended and any problems are found and resolved as quickly as possible? With the help of a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). In simple terms a SCADA system is a way to supervise and manage a process. Kentima is a Swedish company located in Staffanstorp, Skåne, Sweden. They specialise in developing and selling products for the automation and security sector. One of the software sold by Kentima is WideQuick. WideQuick is a software suite which enables the creation of Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) and SCADA solutions. It is on the behalf of Kentima that this project was started as they want to expand their services with a specialised SCADA for the water and wastewater industry. The scope of this thesis is to lay the foundation for a general SCADA solution that can quickly and easily be adapted to function with any water and wastewater facility. The requirements for the functionality of this were generated through an academic research survey. This was complemented with interviews from customers active in the field of water and wastewater with varying responsibilities, such as system integrators. The combination of the latest academic research with the knowledge from people in the industry was thought to give the best possible application. This is because it would give a good balance between the best practices from the academic world along with the practices that are actually used in the industry. As mentioned earlier this project lays the foundation of a SCADA solution. This includes a navigation bar to navigate between different processes. An object library to represent different objects in the process, as well as object control, analysis and overview. The thesis will explain how this was achieved and the reasoning behind the choices made. After the application was build it was then demonstrated to both the company and the customers. This was to get their input and feedback on what looks good, what needs to changed and to inspire things to be developed in the future. The final part of the thesis primarily discusses the feedback from the customers. It also lays out suggestions on things to further develop in the future to complement the project into a complete SCADA application for the water and wastewater industry