Morocco: Topkapi supervision solution at the service of ONEP

The O.N.E.P. (Office National de l'Eau Potable) is the government organization managing most of the drinkable water ressource, and its production, in Morocco. Its role also covers water distribution in rural areas.
 

In order to ensure management of drinkable water in the town of Guelmim, in the South of the country, SEHI was retained by the ONEP following a call for tender for the project’s implementation. SEHI chose to trust Topkapi for supervision, and Perax P200Xm remote management controllers for operating the network, which includes 11 wells, 3 reservoirs, and 2 discharge stations. The system manages pumping automation, regulates the reservoir levels, and manages a conductivity regulation loop.
 

The supervision PC is the system’s vital core, processing all the information. In case of a hardware failure, a total "black out" occurs, without the ability to see what is occurring nor execute any commands. As a hot redundant solution being too costly, SOHIME, a contractor of SEHI representing AREAL in Morocco, proposed a simple, economic and effective architecture meeting the requirements of ONEP : two networked PCs are connected to the peripherals, and to the communication hardware through manual switches.
 

On the first PC, the main station, Topkapi is launched automatically upon start-up. It periodically backs up its logs and the applications context on the second PC, the fail-over station. Should a hardware failure occur on the main PC, an operator switches over, and launches Topkapi on the second station. The latter then starts with the data recorded during the latest backup, enabling normal viewing and command access, hence avoiding total "black out".