Metal Trade Comax a.s., a producer of non-ferrous casting alloys and surface treated metal sheets and bands, needed a comprehensive monitoring and control solution for their production processes. They required a system that could ensure the coated metal exits the production line without defects. The company also wanted to gain interoperability with their devices from different vendors. They were looking for a solution that could interface with their Siemens SIMOTION PLC, which controls the main drives or motors of the production line, and a Siemens Simatic S7-300, connected with industrial ethernet.

Mohegan Sun, a renowned gaming and entertainment destination, needed a system to monitor and control the various aspects of their facility. This included the status of chillers, boilers, and other behind-the-scene systems, as well as approximately 250 VAV boxes, about 60 air handling units (AHUs), 30 exhaust fans, a dozen fan coil units, and a host of temperature and humidity readings. An interesting aspect of this project is the AHUs deployed for the arena. There are four fans moving 200,000 cubic feet per minute of air. Normally these are used to air condition the facility for spectators. However, in case of a fire, the smoke detector system puts these AHUs into “Smoke Mode”. Instead of bringing air into the arena, dampers change and these pull the smoke out of the area, making it easier for firefighters to enter the building.

Mondi Packaging Paper Štětí a.s. is a leading producer of industrial packaging and paper materials. The company operates a large production plant in the Czech Republic, which receives 1000 tons of timber daily and produces 1,500 tons of pulp and paper each day. The plant, which is the largest ICONICS Web application in Europe, has over 100 buildings and employs over 1000 people. The company needed a robust and efficient system to handle the enormous amount of data generated by the plant and to provide real-time visualization of the plant’s operations.

Mosenergo Heating and Pipeline Network in Moscow, Russia, distributes hot water to 99 percent of all the buildings in Moscow for heating. The entire network has 12 regional dispatch centers and over ten heating plants, pump stations, and local facilities. The main challenge for this 24/7/365 application was to deliver thousands of real-time parameters to operators and for operator commands to be delivered back down to the PLCs in a few seconds. Mosenergo had previously tried to develop an in-house system to monitor and control the pipeline heating network.

MSC Cruises, the world’s fourth largest cruise line and largest privately-owned cruise company, sought a modern monitoring and control system for its latest cruise ship, the MSC Meraviglia. The company wanted to include the latest technology in its newest cruise ship, not only for the entertainment of its passengers but also for their, and its crew’s, personal comfort. The comfort and safety of its passengers were a top priority, which included the monitoring and management of its ship wide HVAC system. The cruise ship, the 13th to join MSC Cruises’ fleet since the company’s inception in 2003, is 315 meters long, 43 meters wide and 65 meters high and can travel up to 22.7 knots. Among the ship’s attractions are a water park with multiple water slides, a Himalayan rope course, a Cirque du Soleil theatre, and the largest LED dome at sea.

MultiTrode, a company dedicated to providing advanced solutions to municipal water and wastewater authorities, needed a robust SCADA system for their Outpost 2 product. The system needed to be designed specifically for the needs of water and wastewater networks, and include a graphical interface, alarming & trending, a datastore and reporting interface, a master telemetry unit, and remote telemetry units. The system also needed to be open and powerful, interfacing directly with MultiTrode pump controllers and RTUs to provide valuable information from every site. The system also needed to be easy to use, reducing operational and engineering costs by minimizing the need for site visits while improving asset performance.

The Museum of Krapina Neanderthals, located in northern Croatia, required a solution to integrate and automate its building management systems, security systems, and multimedia systems. The museum, which is technologically oriented and extraordinarily equipped for multimedia presentations, needed a system that could handle data acquisition and aggregation, analysis and alarming, visualization, and real-time status of installations and components. The challenge was to harmoniously integrate, coordinate, and automate these diverse subsystems, which included computers, projectors, MPEG players, audio, video and scenting equipment, electrical branch circuits and lighting, metal curtains, HVAC, Siemens fire system, and Honeywell intrusion system.

The Ondrej Nepela Stadium ice rink in Bratislava, Slovakia, is one of the world’s most modern ice hockey facilities. However, the old Building Management System, installed by SAUTER for Ondrej Nepela, was unable to keep up with the needs of the ice rink. The arena needed a system that could monitor and control the air handling system (HVAC) including fan coils, VAV boxes and a heat exchange station, rink cooling technology, Emax Management System, and skylights. The system also needed to be able to handle nearly 4,000 data points and execute over a hundred defined schedules.

Ontario Power, one of North America’s largest power generators, planned to upgrade its generating stations over the next few years. The generating station being modernized had a production capacity of 240MW and comprised of one main computer supervising 8 generators including plant services equipment. There were 10 local control stations one for each unit, running on industrial type computers. The project had unique requirements, necessitating the use of the new OPC driver for “data mining” in the Unified Tag Browser within GENESIS32, which allows database write and read connections using standard SCADA graphics to a Microsoft database.

The Pentagon, the world's largest office building complex, houses over 23,000 employees and is the headquarters for the United States Department of Defense operations. The building is undergoing a renovation project that includes systems for HVAC, fire, security, lighting, IT/Telco critical monitoring, water systems, and hazardous agent monitoring. The challenge was to design a system that could monitor and access all these systems from a main screen in three operator actions or less. The system needed to be able to access any system, on any floor, in any one of the Pentagon’s five wedges, and from any one of the Pentagon’s five rings.

Permskaya Gres, a thermal electric power plant in Russia, was facing a challenge of synchronizing real-time OPC information from several different information systems. These systems worked independently, had different hardware and software platforms, and were placed far from each other. The goal of the project was to increase the control efficiency and capacity for all power stations, which they called the “Planned Capacity Trend functionality”. The main purpose of the application was to provide information from different power generating control systems and delivering the information in real time to remote users.

PGT Industries, a leading manufacturer and supplier of residential impact-resistant windows and doors in the U.S., was facing a challenge of demand exceeding production capacity, which was constraining revenue growth. The company had developed a capital plan to expand their manufacturing operations. However, before executing the capital expansion, the Vice President of Operations decided to test the assumptions about current capacity by installing and applying a productivity analysis tool. The company selected ICONICS Productivity Analytics software to analyze the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the current plant. The software’s drilldown and correlation capabilities were used to zero in on sources of loss of OEE, focusing on three OEE factors: availability, quality and performance.

Poste Italiane, the national postal system of Italy, was facing challenges in managing its vast operations. The company processes over 7 billion pieces of mail in sorting centers, operates thousands of post offices, and manages thousands of employees. The company needed a solution that could provide real-time information access, enable new customer services, and reduce processing costs. The company aimed to improve several business functions, including plant supervision, monitoring and control, monitoring of production progress, support to plant management, tracking of flows within the sorting center, data collection from field systems, and integration with administrative systems.

PRAKAB a.s., one of the largest producers of wires and cables in the Czech Republic, embarked on an extensive investment program to modernize its plant and increase production. This involved the launch of new cable production lines and the reconstruction and maintenance of management systems for existing production lines. The company's manufacturing processes involve multiple machines, including extruders, decoilers/unwinders, rewinders, heating/cooling devices, and PVC granulate dosers. An average of 300 I/O points are incorporated into each of PRAKAB’s 15 cable and wire manufacturing lines. The company mainly uses Siemens S7-300 PLCs that provide data to the SCADA system over PROFIBUS and Ethernet networks via OPC communication standards.

Preciosa Ornela, a.s., a division of the Preciosa Group, is a specialized glass company involved with metallurgical production, glassmaking, and the manufacturing of raw materials for jewelry. The company required an update to their existing 32-bit HMI/SCADA software involved with the monitoring of temperatures, electrical parameters, and combustion ratio glass sets as part of their production processes. The company was happy with its existing GENESIS32 installation but wanted to add the multiple modern features included in newer 64-bit software. After evaluating offerings from multiple vendors, Preciosa Ornela decided to remain an ICONICS customer and chose GENESIS64.

Racine Water & Wastewater Utilities had been using the GENESIS for DOS as the HMI operator interface software for their plant wide SCADA system at their water utility since 1991. This system controlled the entire water plant and distribution system operation of 3 remote tanks and 1 remote pumping station, from a central control room. However, with the advancement of technology and the need for more efficient and reliable systems, the utility needed to upgrade their system. In 1996, the system was upgraded to GENESIS for Windows and in 2001 the wastewater plant was modernized using GENESIS32™ to increase capacity and to automate and centralize the control to one room. An extensive evaluation was made of leading SCADA vendors. GENESIS32™ was selected because of the speed and redundancy of data collection systems, as well as due to the superior OPC-based data engine allowing live changes to the system without the need to restart.

R-CUA, a company specializing in the design, financing, development and operation of heat networks, power stations and associated energy sources, sought an automation software solution that would monitor the power plant and heat distribution in the city of Strasbourg in real time. The company required that the software be able to provide information via web browser as well as via mobile devices. In addition, the company sought to manage consumption and potentially save on energy costs. A primary location involved in the installation is the Eco2 Wacken plant, located in Strasbourg. The selected automation software solution needed to integrate with multiple BACnet controllers, with three controllers located at the Eco2 Wacken plant. The entire network contains over 2,000 tags, including 16 delivery points, each managed via BACnet controller. The delivery points and the boiler house are connected via 8 kilometers of optical fiber. R-CUA wanted a solution that would work with its existing Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 machines and Windows SQL 2012 databases, as well as with cloud-based servers and multiple mobile clients.

Rimske Terme, a luxurious Business, Wellness and Spa Resort in Slovenia, embarked on a project in 2010 to update their Building Management System (BMS). The resort wanted to integrate a number of existing automated systems, including hotel room temperature regulation, room emergency/security functions, air conditioning, lighting, and diesel fuel use. They also wanted central control over their heating/cooling (heat pump) station, pumping station, thermal water pump station and electric power station operations. The hotel room automation required a BMS that could adapt to a few differences in each location. For instance, the heating/cooling in Hotel Sofijin Dvor and Hotel Zdraviliški Dvor is based on air diffusers, while in Hotel Rimski Dvor, it is accomplished via fan coils.

Rome Metro S.p.A. (Met.Ro.) operates the Metropolitan Rome rail and surface bus lines within the city of Rome, Italy. They also manage some regional bus lines. The organization oversees two main metro rail lines with a total of 53 stations and is currently constructing a third line with 34 additional stations. Each line is approximately 22 km in length. The challenge was to monitor and control the metro line from a centralized location and provide alarm notification for the coordination of emergency actions. The system needed to centralize security monitoring and provide the status of auxiliary equipment at each of the remote stations on the rail line. The auxiliary equipment being monitored included ventilation systems, fire systems, moving stairs, elevators, normal and emergency lighting systems, uninterrupted power supplies, inverters, etc.

The University of Bristol (UoB) is a top-ranking university in the UK with a vast estate comprising over 600 hectares of land and more than 370 buildings. The buildings range in age from the late 17th century to the 21st century. Given the large number of buildings, estate management is crucial. A major requirement of the project was to integrate the buildings together to provide a secure, future-proof centralized building management solution. The UoB was looking for a modern, future-proof solution platform that would allow them to continue to build new capabilities as new equipment and buildings were needed and connected to the Secure Data network (SDN). The University needed a company with reliable software solutions that could meet several objectives, including providing all departments of the University with accommodations of quality and functionality, ensuring the most efficient use of all built space, working to reduce the University’s carbon emissions, and enabling Building Management System (BMS), Fire Monitoring, Critical Alarms, Sustainability Monitoring, etc.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) had set an ambitious goal of reducing energy use by 15 percent across many of its buildings. To achieve this, the university had been installing energy-efficient equipment and automating building systems to ensure that mechanical and electrical equipment minimized energy waste. However, just like a brand-new car that’s driven off the lot, building equipment starts to deteriorate as soon as it’s installed, losing energy efficiency over time. To mitigate deterioration, UNL had in the past performed ad-hoc recommissioning, but was now developing a comprehensive recommissioning program. The university wanted to find a way to maintain optimal performance without the expense of periodic recommissioning.

The University of Pennsylvania sought to create a unified HMI/SCADA system for 120 buildings, equaling nearly 14 million square feet, throughout its Philadelphia, PA campus. The university wanted the means to manage connected systems via its centralized Operations Control Center (OCC) in order to gain complete visibility into building automation equipment and facility operations. The new system would replace an existing one that the operators found to be obsolete. The selected HMI/SCADA solution would be required to monitor and control critical equipment across multiple campus buildings including those related to HVAC systems, chiller plants, electrical substations, lighting and space conditions. In addition, the university required system-level redundancy in order to maximize the uptime of these building systems. Also, whichever vendor was chosen would need to work with third-party contractors responsible for implementing each phase of deployment and work through the replacement of the entire campus command and control system while all the buildings involved remained occupied and in use.

VEC Technology required an HMI/SCADA solution coupled with data bridging/reporting/archiving that can be used over the Web, can integrate with the OPC communications protocol and can directly interface with the company’s product databases. They required the solution to control and monitor the company’s patented closed molding operations. They wanted a system that could manage various parameters based on several criteria, including the specific product being produced, ambient conditions and material properties. Also necessary was the ability to provide long term storage of multiple key parameters for product warranty information. The company sought a product with future-proof technology. They also looked for a solution that presented a simple user interface for making edits, as well as an easily maintained Web-based client/server architecture. VEC Technology aimed for a “single vendor” approach, intending to reduce both the number of automation interfaces as well as extra support staff to maintain various systems.

VIA University, established in 2008, has grown significantly over the years, expanding from 38 sites to 18 sites across Denmark. As part of this expansion, the university began construction of new facilities and sought new options for building management solutions. The university required a software vendor who could provide a cost-effective, open building management solution for their Aarhus N and Aarhus C campuses. The primary concern was the monitoring and control of campus buildings’ daily operation, especially the comfort of occupants, as the university believes that an optimized indoor climate is the best environment for learning. Minimizing operational cost was also a factor in the school’s decision. The university has its own building management user’s manual, revised once or twice a year, which is considered essential to optimal operations. With this in mind, the school sought a software vendor that would reduce complexity in operations, while ultimately reducing associated costs.

Vitkovice Steel, a leading European manufacturer of rolled steel products, was faced with the challenge of replacing a production monitoring system from the late 1980’s, in addition to control systems based on obsolete Czechoslovakian computers (PPC-4). The company needed a system that could meet their high availability, 24x7 requirements, as well as scale to the needs of about 180 users. They also needed a system that could integrate seamlessly with existing systems, including KEP Servers, Stratus Servers, Siemens Simatic S7 PLCs, Oracle 9.2 database, UZ line-over databases, stampers in hot or cold conditions (3964R), and paint stampers. The system also needed to connect easily to the company’s existing Microsoft products, including Windows 2003 Server, Windows 2000 and XP clients, Microsoft Office and SQL databases.

Volgogradoblgaz OJSC, a company that transports natural gas from gas pipelines to the population as well as to industrial and municipal enterprises, was looking to modernize their facilities with cutting-edge Oil & Gas technology. The company's existing system, TraceMode, was outdated and not able to meet the company's needs. The harsh climate and weather in Volgograd also posed challenges to regular maintenance. The company needed a solution that could improve energy efficiency and overall plant manageability.

The Webb County Water Treatment Plant (WTP) in Rio Bravo, Texas was facing challenges due to population growth and rising water quality requirements. The existing plant was outdated and required high maintenance. It lacked a computerized control or SCADA system, making the operation of the process equipment, water intake, and distribution systems time-consuming. Additionally, most of the plant personnel were native Spanish speakers and were not fluent in technical English. This posed a challenge in operating a new, sophisticated control system. The new SCADA system needed to be user-friendly, graphically enhanced, and bilingual to accommodate the language needs of the staff.

The growth of Xi’an Xianyang International Airport made it necessary to seek a monitoring and control solution that could handle communication with multiple different data sources as well as scale to the wide array of equipment that is continuously added. One primary concern was energy use and temperature control throughout the 360,000 square meters of indoor airport space. China Western Airport Group and the Xi’an Airport Construction Co., Ltd. created a dedicated energy center that could assist them in providing comfortable temperatures for millions of passengers as well as the great number of people who work within the airport facilities. As the airport expands, so too does its energy use, as well as the complexity of its energy system. Airport officials required an HMI/SCADA system with a safe, reliable, cost-saving energy management component.

United Biscuits, specifically their McVitie’s brand, was looking to automate their biscuit baking process. The challenge was to translate the intelligence of more than 30 years of experience into an automatic, high-performance process control system that was user-friendly and could be retrofitted on the existing equipment. The control of the oven, which produces thousands of biscuits per hour, was previously governed by an operator with many years of experience. The knowledge of this operator was documented and formulated into a set of rules for adjusting the oven control based on the quality of the biscuits exiting the oven.

Transneft, Russia’s largest oil pipeline company, manages the world’s largest oil pipeline that extends over 48,000 miles from Siberia to the Baltics. The pipeline transports 420 million tons of oil a year through severe environments. The installation project involved installing over 400 pumping stations and 1000 holding tanks in 101 locations supplying 35 refineries. The challenge was to monitor and control this extensive pipeline system, which is responsible for transporting 99.5% of all the oil used in Russia. The system supplies 35 different refineries with their daily crude oil and provides both Europe and China with oil products. The pipeline system required a centralized dispatch and SCADA system to monitor the 400 pumping stations and 1,000 large oil tanks in 100 different tank farms.