Water 4.0 – Fit for the Future

Increasing Demands on Modern Process Control Systems

Faster, more transparent and more efficient: In water management too, processes are being linked together more and more, and the demands are constantly increasing. This is true of the Stuttgart sewer system as well. The Stuttgart municipal waterworks company is responsible for the 1,685 km (1,047 mile) long sewer system of the state capital. With its 51 rainwater retention basis, 82 rainwater overflow basins and 32 wastewater pump stations, the sewer system is one of the largest in Germany. The challenge: Outdated software and spare part procurement problems were bogging down the entire process control system of the Stuttgart municipal waterworks to a huge degree.

This also meant that a great deal of manual work had to be performed. It quickly became clear that modernizing the 25-year-old process control system would not suffice to meet the increasing demands of our ever more networked world. Therefore, the decision makers at the Stuttgart municipal waterworks opted for extensive renovation and replacement of the process control system. Thus a procurement project was initiated for a modern process control system for data collection and telecontrol for the sewer system and special facilities. But what intelligent solutions exist on the market to meet these high demands? To get a precise overview of the various solutions, a comprehensive market analysis was carried out.

Mr. Georgios Doanoulakis, who is responsible for the process control system of the special facilities of the municipal waterworks, explains: “In order to be able to make a well-informed decision, we conducted site visits of many urban and municipal solutions with the help of our network. We then developed our solution through an intensive exchange of experience with the people involved.”

ME-Automation Projects GmbH was able to win the resulting public tender with its own PMSX®pro process control system and WAGO telecontrol technology.

Modernizing the Entire Process Control System

“The goal was to harmonize the entire system and bring it to a new level. Ultimately, appropriate structures had to constitute a complete system,” says Michael Juch, Senior Sales Manager at ME-Automation Projects GmbH, summarizing the initial situation. Mr. Juch has been at ME-Automation Projects since 2004 and is familiar with the challenges of complex solutions in the infrastructure domain. One sub-domain of this is wastewater treatment plants – in this case, the Stuttgart sewer system, which required extensive modernization.

But first, back to the beginning!

The demands on the new process control system were high due to the complexity of the sewer system, and the issue of its territorial expansion must not be overlooked either. The ability to expand modularly without retroactive effects, which protects the customer’s investment, was just as important a criterion as a high-availability, distributed control system architecture.

Besides the technical demands, the schedule itself was ambitious, since the existing analog connection over phone lines needed to be gradually disconnected and new secure communication connections established.

The first step was the renovation of the process control system (construction stages 1 and 2) for the first 20 or 40 of 500 special facilities. For this purpose, the new process control level was first set up in the central control station and the communication connection established. In the first expansion step, the process control level consists of control stations, a redundant process server, redundant VPN routers for connecting the special facilities, an IT application server for secure communication and an archive server.