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Lyonnaise des Eaux : 500 sites near Bordeaux equipped with Topkapi
In order to fully ensure its supervision functions for remote management applications, Topkapi is sometimes used to act as a genuine telephone switchboard. This is notably the case for the Bordeaux urban community equipped with this industrial supervision solution.
In addition to the delegated management of the Communauté Urbaine de Bordeaux (600,000 Inhabitants), Lyonnaise des Eaux operate a large number of facilities in rural areas comprising drinkable water tanks and pumping stations, water processing stations and sewage raising stations, as well as irrigation facilities. The entire facilities represent around 500 sites featuring Aquaveil remote transmitters, over a 100 km radius around Bordeaux.
In order to rationalize on-site interventions, the remote stations have been grouped into two geographical zones distributed over two Topkapi servers.
The alarms are sent to these two centralized operating stations located at Louis Fargues, and three client stations (one in Bruges, one in Perigueux, and a third station in the premises of a contractor to send the alarms during non working hours). Every night, all the sites are called automatically by Topkapi in order to have available in the morning the information required to produce the operating summaries.
Each Topkapi server is fitted with 30 modems using grouped telephone lines. The first free modem is used for incoming (alarms) or outgoing (operator or automatic call) calls, and there is practically always one line available. Also, Topkapi manages a modem for Minitel calls, and receives information from SERIEE remote transmitters. The number of modems has been increased in respect of the strict basic requirement, in order to cope with crisis situations which occur for example during storms.
In cruise operation, the night calls are paced per groups of 16 stations, and 250 stations are read in approximately 1h30 for each server. At a given time, one can also program a call to all stations, by reserving a few modems for incoming calls, reducing the full reading cycle to less than one hour.
During these phases, manual connection requests (upon operator initiative) are processed in priority, thus the intense connections do not embarrass users during operation.