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The Narragansett Bay, located on the north side of Rhode Island Sound, is New England's largest estuary. The Narragansett Bay Commission (NBC) has two wastewater treatment plants, one located at Field's Point, near Providence, R.I., and one approximately 5 miles across the bay at Bucklin Point, R.l. Each plant had a different control system technology and vastly different human-machine interfaces (HMIs).
NBC wanted to change the existing HMI at both plants to a new HMI. NBC first selected the Wonderware application server and the InTouch HMI to be the new standard for the HMI at both plants. Next it publicly requested qualifications and proposals from experienced integrators to implement the conversion.
Optimation, an engineering, design, and fabrication company headquartered in Rochester, N.Y., gathered information regarding the existing system's size, magnitude of reusability for objects and graphics, and similarity in treatment plant processes and screens. The company quoted the project and pursued what it believes is a growing industry sector: distributed control system (DCS) HMI migration.
The challenge was to design a system to replace one manufacturer's HMI product, but be flexible enough to accommodate another product by a different manufacturer as part of the overall...