Alan Hudson is US Sales Manager for Trihedral Engineering, the manufacturer of VTScada software. Alan holds degrees in Mathematics from Samford University and Electrical Engineering from Auburn University. Throughout his 32 year career in the Water & Wastewater industry, he has been intimately involved with automation and controls engineering, consultative design, programming, and system integration.

Notifying operations personnel of alarm conditions continues to be among the most important functions of a water and/or wastewater SCADA system. Further, the SCADA system’s purpose is to facilitate an understanding of alarm condition such that operations personnel can respond efficiently and effectively. Today’s SCADA systems are evolving beyond the monitoring of standalone process, a single plant, or a network of remote water distribution and wastewater collections, and are quickly moving toward a utility-wide SCADA system with a central administration hub with distributed sub-systems, each being responsible for their own assets.

Utility-wide SCADA provides numerous benefits including centralized security management, configuration standards and templates, operational standardization, and large-scale decision-making. Even so, the importance of alarm management remains paramount. Indeed, the creation of a centralized architecture allows alarms at the sub-systems to be managed from a utility perspective in regards prioritization, responsibility allocation, consistency and data analysis. Key industry standards provide important direction in the establishment of alarm policy, and these standards can be applied at a utility-wide level. While standards help implement best practices, a reliable, scalable and fail-safe SCADA architecture provides the structure required to make utility-wide SCADA systems successful.

This presentation explores the SCADA functionality required to support reliable alarm management by applying industry standards and good network architecture techniques in utility-wide SCADA build-outs. The presentation includes a demonstration of some Tips & Tricks that will make any SCADA system and Operations team more effective.