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SEAAL: water management in Greater Algiers by the Topkapi
The Algerian government has called upon the expertise of Suez Environnement to lead an ambitious program of modernization of water and sewerage services of the greater Algiers. The objective: improve significantly the quality of water distributed and the sewerage network to ultimately ensure 24h/day service continuity.
The contract signed later 2005 for a 5-year period relies on an action plan, including notably the transfer of skills from the teams of Suez Environnement to the teams of ADE (Algérienne Des Eaux) and ONA (Office National de l’Assainissement), and the implementation of modern technical management tools. It is the Topkapi software platform which is used to meet the needs of remote control.
A supervision tool to cover needs on two distinct activities
The activity covers two fields:
- drinking water, with more than 300 sites, including production and transfer plants, pumping stations, storage sites and distribution points,
- sewerage with 100 sites in the collection network (black spots and booster stations) and treatment stations
The remote control center of Kouba, inaugurated in 2008 by President Bouteflika, is linked with one third of the sites. It is fitted with a wall display, made of eight 67-inch cubes in retro projection technology, to monitor all facilities and the status of the transfers. Ultimately, facility operating functions will be implemented from Topkapi supervision stations distributed in sector remote control centers.
Two Topkapi server stations – one dedicated to drinking water, the other to sewerage – are fitted in the remote control center and communicate with field devices, most of which are remote management controllers by Sofrel and Tbox (SEMAPHORE), Radcom-Hydreka remote transmitters and industrial programmable controllers (SIEMENS, SCHNEIDER, and ABB), and allowing to:
- measure flow rates (flows or volumes), levels in reservoirs and status of drinking water primary pumping stations
- monitor booster stations and black spots for sewerage
- supply technical management databases for both activities
Topkapi, a complete supervision solution
The many protocols proposed in native in Topkapi have considerably simplified the deployment of the architecture, by reusing directly, without gateway or third party server, the data from all existing devices installed when reconstructing the network after the May 2003 earthquake.
Communication relies on radio and GSM links, and permanent links of the VPN type in GPRS technology with GSM backup are being gradually deployed to ensure real-time communication with major sites.
Drinking water production plants each have a local Topkapi server station for operating; they provide supervision for sector remote controls. They communicate with the Remote control center via SEAAL’s corporate network, based on the Wimax technologies and leased links; in the future, these links should have a GPRS backup to increase network availability. At the Kouba center, the Topkapi server station dedicated to drinking water can hence open, as a client, the application of the production plants. A summary application based on permanent information from sector servers has also been developed.
The structure of the client/server architecture in distributed applications is particularly well adapted to communication between remote stations, and provides major flexibility in deployment. Thanks to this flexibility and many communication protocols, Topkapi is the solution adapted to this changing project, and offers the guarantees required for its success.