Sydney Water Corporation operational control strategy

This paper examines the implementation and functionality of the Sydney Water operational control strategy utilising the IICATS System. IICATS, the Integrated Instrumentation, Control, Automation & Telemetry System, as the name suggests, is a complete system from the instrumentation and controls on each operational asset through to the sophisticated human machine interfaces (HMI) used by water and wastewater system operators, maintainers, managers, developers, modellers and other business users and systems. A key component in the design philosophy was for the control to be distributed to the lowest levels of the system and, wherever possible, to remain autonomous from the next higher level. This has resulted in sites being able to operate completely independently from the Telemetry Master. All site calculations and profiles necessary for the control of the site are held in the RTU. Where necessary the RTUs communicate via peer to peer calls to other RTUs to modify the local process control based on upstream and/or downstream conditions. Systemic control (AND control of entire systems/subsystems) is achieved by algorithms running at the Telemetry Master and supplemented by the use of hydraulic models.