SITA BioEnergies: environmental and energetic hypervisor with Topkapi

To meet current and future environmental and energy stakes, the use of organic waste to produce biogas is bound for important development. SITA BioEnergies offer their clients to benefit from this energy potential which remains poorly used nowadays to gain in profitability while protecting the environment. Today, more than 50 biogas treatment and valorization units were designed and are operated by SITA BioEnergies, generating enough energy to supply a town of 60,000 inhabitants. Supported by the development of this market and to optimize their operating and maintenance costs, SITA BioEnergies chose the town of Gargenville (78) to install a control center allowing to use a single location to monitor and control all their facilities. The sites are interconnected at the control center through a dedicated and private secured SDSL technical network (backed up by the phone network) allowing real-time operation.

A total 50 Topkapi licenses were used for local control/command of the units and more than 10,000 variables remote controlled by the hypervisor.

At the heart of the control center is a Topkapi server license allowing to:

• Open the Topkapi application of each site in client mode by a simple declaration of stations and without particular development
• Supervise all sites through synthetic views designed from basic variables produced by the local Topkapi applications, variables used by the central application as if they came from a controller. "The summary synoptic diagrams offer an easily usable first summary information level" explains M. ERNULT, in charge of electricity and automation at SITA BioEnergies. The ability to view the local application from a site in client mode (as if the operator was in front of the local control station) offers a second finer level of diagnostic of the facility.

Heavy client stations of the Netview type hosted at the control center are also made available to the regions (a total of 5) and viewed networked in a secured way from the outside in Microsoft's RDP(1) client. They allow to use a general purpose computer, without prior installation, on the one hand to view the control center's summary application and on the other hand for direct connection to the Topkapi servers of each site, without using the control center's Topkapi server. In case of alarms, maintenance agents can hence pre-diagnostic the sites in order to optimize their movements.

The application in Gargenville also uses the Topkapi modules:
 

• Remote alarm notification for nationwide centralized management of the stand-by service and transmit them locally to maintenance personnel, hence ensuring traceability of interventions on site.
• Summary reports to produce reports for maintenance, for biogas energy production monitoring and for monitoring of quantities of materials treated for concentrated effluents. The summaries are consolidated per site, region and nationwide.

Each local application is maintained and evolves autonomously, without having to act on the client stations connected.

The flexibility of deployment of this type of client/server architecture based on Topkapi servers with many network interconnected sites and high exchanged data volumetrics is the guarantee for SITA BioEnergies to be able to upgrade the system at a lesser cost and in full autonomy to follow evolutions of their market.
 
⁽¹⁾ Remote Desktop Protocol