Regional Water Authority

Legacy network risk mitigation and upgrade roadmap:

A new regional water authority was created by the merger of several co-operative irrigation trusts with the urban water authority of a large regional city.

The new authority inherited a jumble of disparate and obsolete telemetry systems, two of which had major reliability issues.

Despite being severely hampered by equipment breakdowns, the authority needed significant time to secure the major funding needed for a complete SCADA and telemetry merger and upgrade.

37South was able to act as subject matter experts, by providing the authority with a number of interim and strategic services, which included:

• An initial review of the legacy networks to identify operational and technology risks, and develop a short term reliability mitigation plan which also considered longer term upgrade needs.
• Develop a roadmap towards a state of art open standard digital SCADA network to assist upgrade planning and budgeting.
• Provide complex fault investigation and urgent repairs to effect reliability improvements on legacy equipment at a number of separate township locations.
• Urgently replace one critically obsolete analogue radio network with a state of art digital radio platform that supported both the legacy (proprietary) RTU hardware, and open connectivity standards for proposed RTU upgrades. This required considerable reverse engineering of the proprietary legacy equipment.
• Greatly improving the diagnostic reporting capability of the existing networks.
• Migrate the SCADA host towards open standard protocols, allowing progressive system upgrades.