Category: Water and Wastewater, None

Cork County Council

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Cork, Ireland

Cork County covers an area of 2,880 square miles, making Cork the largest county in Ireland at 11% of the Irish State. After a European Union (EU) directive to reduce energy consumption by 30% by 2020, Cork County Council realized that understanding their area’s network would be crucial in providing superior service. To aid with this, they converted an existing GENESIS32™ system to GENESIS64™ in a seamless process to allow them to benefit from the latest technologies.

Challenges

  • Upgrade an existing GENESIS32™ system while maintaining compatibility with a number of legacy non-ICONICS SCADA solutions.
  • Meet new EU directives on energy consumption.
  • Calculate the water usage for each district metering area (DMA).

Results

  • An asset tree of DMAs was created using a simple, intuitive point-and-click interface.
  • A collaboration between ICONICS application support engineers and Cully Automation Ltd. leveraged Cully's expertise in water conservation and led to AnalytiX product enhancements.
  • From a single view, the Council can access charts and reports on the status of any meter from any DMA in the county.
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“Cully Automation Ltd. chose ICONICS’ AnalytiX® solution firstly because of the working relationship and support which ICONICS has given us in the past, and secondly because we think ICONICS now has the software tools at their disposal with GENESIS64™ and AnalytiX to deliver the complete countywide SCADA, Leakage and Energy Management solution to our customer.”

— David Cully, Project Manager | Cully Automation

About Cork County Council

Cork County covers an area of 2,880 square miles, making Cork the largest county in Ireland at 11% of the Irish State. After deciding to institute a directive from the European Union (EU) to reduce energy consumption by 30% by 2020, Cork County Council realized that understanding their area’s network would be crucial in providing superior service. Cork County Council treats and supplies water to approximately 40,000 non-domestic customers and 100,000 homes across the county. Due to its size, Cork County is broken up into four zones–North, South, East and West Cork–which makes data aggregation even more difficult to manage. At the time, the council was using manual data entry with Excel to produce the leakage figures required by the Department of the Environment. However, with four zones to maintain, this method made it too difficult to efficiently calculate leakage figures.
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“Cully Automation Ltd. chose ICONICS’ AnalytiX® solution firstly because of the working relationship and support which ICONICS has given us in the past, and secondly because we think ICONICS now has the software tools at their disposal with GENESIS64™ and AnalytiX to deliver the complete countywide SCADA, Leakage and Energy Management solution to our customer.”

— David Cully, Project Manager | Cully Automation
Bing Maps Integration with AnalytiX Bing Maps Integration with AnalytiX

ICONICS Software Deployed

This is where ICONICS’ GENESIS64™ and AnalytiX® products really come into their own; Cully Automation Ltd. was able to simply convert the existing graphics that had been deployed on earlier GENESIS32™ projects, and connect directly to the SCADA data.

However, it was not just ICONICS’ SCADA that needed integration, with the County having a number of legacy non-ICONICS SCADA solutions still operational, there were many components needing additional conversion. By using GENESIS64 and the OPC platform, the full integration was a seamless process, providing what is now a true County-wide visualization solution leveraging Bing™ maps. From this single SharePoint® 2010 view, the Council can access charts and reports on the status of any meter from any District Metering Area (DMA) in the county.
Bing Maps Integration with AnalytiX Bing Maps Integration with AnalytiX

Project Summary

AnalytiX Overview Screen of a DMA AnalytiX Overview Screen of a DMA
The average daily volume of water produced in Cork County is estimated to be well over 150,000 yd3/day with the total length of water in the Public Water Supply Schemes estimated to be 3,500 miles long. The number of yards from which to retrieve that data continues to increase – approximately 391 DMAs with up to 3 yards per DMA.

With such a vast supply network, the Council could not meet the new EU directives on energy consumption by continuing to use traditional manual data collection methods. Therefore, with the EU regulations looming, and the scale of data collection increasing, Cork County looked to Cully Automation Ltd. to install a number of Plant SCADA systems to control and monitor local stations.

Due to the nature of this deployment, a collaborative approach was undertaken by ICONICS application support engineers and Cully Automation Ltd. This allowed Cully Automation Ltd. to impart their knowledge and expertise in Water Conservation projects which led to AnalytiX product enhancements, strengthening the product for everyone. This is a business model ICONICS is proud to use and enables the company to remain at the cutting edge of industry standards.
AnalytiX Overview Screen of a DMA AnalytiX Overview Screen of a DMA
A Bar Chart Comparison of Daily Water Use A Bar Chart Comparison of Daily Water Use

Benefits of the System

ICONICS products enabled the system to daily send data from each remote meter, to be read in the Historian and used for calculating the water usage for each DMA. By using a simple, intuitive point-and-click interface, an asset tree of DMAs was able to be quickly created and calculations added. By leveraging the latest Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 R2 technologies including StreamInsight the collected data was then integrated together to produce an up-to-date and accurate DMA water usage figure.
A Bar Chart Comparison of Daily Water Use A Bar Chart Comparison of Daily Water Use

“We were the only company to be able to provide a turnkey solution from putting the meter in the ground, to delivering a leakage report on the county manager’s desk. This was achieved because ICONICS’ GENESIS64 and AnalytiX products provide a consistent user interface designed upon open industry and IT standards.”

— David Cully, Project Manager | Cully Automation

Conclusion

David Cully, Project Manager, said “We were the only company to be able to provide a turnkey solution from putting the meter in the ground, to delivering a leakage report on the county manager’s desk. This was achieved because ICONICS’ GENESIS64 and AnalytiX products provide a consistent user interface designed upon open industry and IT standards.”  The Cork County Council Water Conservation project ended up with over 1,000 remote telemetry flow meters sent data via GPRS and over 1,000 data points all integrated into a single view of County-wide SCADA, Water Conservation & Energy Management.

“We were the only company to be able to provide a turnkey solution from putting the meter in the ground, to delivering a leakage report on the county manager’s desk. This was achieved because ICONICS’ GENESIS64 and AnalytiX products provide a consistent user interface designed upon open industry and IT standards.”

— David Cully, Project Manager | Cully Automation