Orange County Sanitation District (OC San) is a public agency that provides wastewater collection, treatment, and disposal services for approximately 2.6 million people in central and northwest Orange County. The company owns and operates several sites throughout Southern California. Enterprise Automation began working with OC San in 2016, starting several significant projects, including programming services, Topview implementation, and Wonderware support.
OC San was beginning to upgrade its entire SCADA system and PLC architecture. Part of this project involved updating equipment graphics to display more granular information regarding the permissive conditions required for each piece of equipment to run as opposed to showing a single status indicator. This would facilitate troubleshooting for operators by helping them determine which specific requirements inhibited asset control without needing to investigate each permissive.
For this project we provided a toolset to automate the extraction of these conditions, representing upwards of 46,000 states, from over 40 PLC programs. Automating this process would be more accurate and take one-tenth of the time compared to the manual process, which would have needed an estimated minimum of 1,150 person-hours.
Over the years, our team has developed several innovative tools to accelerate our workflows and deliver more value to our clients. One tool is our InSpect framework which incorporates a proprietary algorithm to automate the process of interpreting and reverse engineering PLC programs. We deployed the InSpect framework to automate the reverse engineering of the logic, which permitted equipment assets such as pumps to run for all of OC SAN’s ProWORX NxT PLC programs. This tool was tested for accuracy and verified to operate at an average speed of 0.04 milliseconds per condition analyzed, which is magnitudes faster than the original 90 seconds per condition for manual inspection by an engineer.
For this project, our InSpect framework was deployed to automate the reverse engineering of the logic, which permits equipment assets (pumps, etc.) to run for all of OC SAN’s ProWORX NxT PLC programs. This tool was tested to show efficacy without errors and verified to operate at an average speed of 0.04 milliseconds per condition analyzed – several magnitudes faster than the original 90 seconds per condition for manual inspection by an engineer.
