Supervisory Monitoring and Control Solution on Android Mobile Devices for the Water Industry 4.0

Abstract

The capacity for using mobile devices for monitoring and controlling local processes has seen rapid growth in industry for maintenance operations before and after deployment. This is especially important in the case of geographically widely-dispersed locations, such as in the case of the water sector, where processes, technologies, and local automation solutions are widely spread. Usually, the available mobile solutions are dependent on Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) software installed in the control rooms of water and wastewater facilities, usually without configuration possibilities. Considering the various SCADA control rooms, each focusing on a specific system, and hundreds of smaller locations accessible only with PLC and eventually a small touch screen, the dependence on local SCADA software is proving increasingly impractical. This paper presents the implementation of an easy-to-use SCADA system for the Android operating system, conceived following Industry 4.0 concepts. An OPC UA client-based architecture is proposed to cope with current interoperability standards, mobility and security across industrial processes in various domains. The design relies on a foreground service for uninterrupted communication between the application and the OPC UA client. The system is envisaged to provide notifications to alert the user when alarms are triggered, including both an independent application level alarming module and a new Alarms and Conditions based protocol level module, increasing visibility and response time for technical issues or faults, and being adaptable to both legacy and modern OPC UA specifications. The solution was tested first in the laboratory to validate the communication system with as many OPC UA structures as possible, and then in real scenarios with drinking water and wastewater systems interfacing PLC, HMI and SCADA level OPC UA servers. The tests in the real scenarios included a second-level test for water operators and engineers which accessed and monitored various processes with the developed solution, and all results proved to be satisfactory.