According to Elektronik Praxis, the financial saving potentials have been confirmed by The Zweckverband Wasser und Abwasser Vogtland (ZWAV- Water purpose or Wastewater purpose Association) which is an essential result for a complete communication architecture based on OPC UA.
The technical supply for the water and wastewater which includes the water supply of 40 towns and municipalities, 37 towns with wastewater disposal, and with a total of 240,000 inhabitants in municipalities are more than 550 plants that are distributed over an area of 1,400 Km2.
Waterworks, pumping stations, elevated tanks, sewage treatment plants, and sewer relief structures are a number of plants. In the control room, the information was collected centrally in the past so that it can sometimes coordinate in a cost-intensive service assignment.
Process data can be buffered with special requirements in the event of a failure in the communication transport with the use of many protocols with different configurations that led to high maintenance effort and costs that are corresponded over the years.
The proprietary of the communication protocols can be abolished and the decentralized can be installed with networked intelligence that has been reduced with engineering and service effort with a lowered cost although the IT security need to be increased and the data need to be available at the same time.
For direct Machine 2 Machine communication by using OPC UA, in the decentralized properties, all sorts of devices are required to operate autonomously. The smallest embedded controller can be networked intelligently with each other and communication can be done directly to each other.
The application is although represented as a first-time real implementation which is a result of the cooperation between PLC open and OPC working groups where real objects like pumps were modeled in IEC 61131-3 PLC control as a complex object for possible interaction.
Due to the OPC UA server being integrated into the controller, these objects were automatically available to the outside world for semantic interoperability as a complex data structure.