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Monitoring and Control Web System for United Utilities

United Utilities (UU) has operations stretching across the UK and around the globe, providing essential services to millions of people every day. From keeping the taps flowing and the lights shining to helping businesses communicate, UU provides services to 1 in 5 of the UK's population.

In particular, UU supplies water and wastewater services to nearly 3 million customers in the North West of England, operating the water and wastewater treatment operations across the region. Effective management of this network is critical to, and is at the core of, UU's business. Operation, maintenance and asset replacement costs all have to be optimised in order to meet the regulatory requirements placed upon it.

In order to effectively manage its network, like many other Utilities, UU has a comprehensive SCADA system. The SCADA system provides valuable data to control engineers, but it also contains data that is useful to the wider UU engineering community. Traditionally, SCADA systems have been isolated from the corporate data network, primarily for operational security reasons. UU recognised that this data is valuable and wanted to make it available to the engineering community as a whole, including asset replacement and maintenance engineers.

The challenge UU faced was how to distribute this data to all, at a minimum cost. Utilisation of the existing company network and standard company PC desktop environment was seen as key to this, in particular the use of Internet Explorer to provide a web enabled interface to the SCADA system.

Capula was retained by UU to provide an Operational IT solution for this. Using our extensive knowledge of SCADA systems, we extracted the data from the SCADA system and made it available to everyone, through the standard desktop environment.

The M&C Web system functionality provides the user with the functionality to view digital and analogue data via configurable trending and tabular screens, enabling analysis of information in either real time or from any period during the last 14 months. Alarm history is also stored in the central database where it can be retrieved and viewed as required from any period during the last 7 months. The solution included Web forms that enable reports to be generated with a bank of commonly used preconfigured reports available to the users to browse or modify and save for future use. The M&C Web system can also be deployed in a stand-alone configuration and can therefore be used to display real time and local historical information from sites where the local historian database is installed.