SCADA Assessment and Evaluation

This project was sparked when the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District (LVMWD) sought new technology and standardization for their control system. This system operates LVMWD’s water, wastewater, and composting facilities. The first step toward reaching this goal was to obtain a thorough evaluation of their automation infrastructure. Cannon was selected to assess LVMWD’s control system infrastructure and develop recommendations for SCADA standards.

Cannon accurately identified discrepancies and unique needs across the different facilities and operations. From each facility, we assessed the operational function, security configuration, and network/telemetry architecture. Cannon worked closely with LVMWD staff to investigate challenges with the existing system, recognize the most significant needs for the water and wastewater sites, and to formulate outcomes and opportunities for control system improvement.

As part of our services, Cannon selected a new, reliable, and cost-effective programmable logic controller (PLC) platform. Our team kept LVMWD’s existing Modicon PLC’s, ovation distributed control system (DCS), and the Human Machine Interface (HMI) functionality in mind while making the upgrades since each significantly impacted the operations’ interactions with both the control system and field devices. LVMWD’s SCADA-installed base of Wonderware and Ovation DCS also influenced decision-making, as well as reliability, maintenance, standardized functionality, overall costs, ease of use, integration/implementation, future obsolescence, and migration across products/platforms, vendor reliability, and technical support.

Cannon conducted a “Current and Future Needs” workshop with the LVMWD team to present findings from our field investigations, identify current and future needs, and develop priorities for the key criteria in the SCADA evaluation. Additionally, we consulted vendors to establish a basis for the best product offerings, pricing for installation, and estimated 15-year operational cost. The results of this process were compiled later into a final SCADA evaluation report that was given to LVMWD for their use and reference.