IT‑IS‑Networking
Technology › Integration & Operational Technology

SCADA & Utility Control Systems

Water treatment and wastewater control across a utility estate, with redundant control sites — where the stakes are physical rather than informational.

Also known as Process Control, PQM, Power Quality Metering, Substation Networking

Left to right is time. Each row is one of the 13 disciplines this one worked alongside, ordered so kindred disciplines sit next to each other rather than alphabetically — a landscape only means anything if neighboring rows belong together. Height is the work running in that domain in that year, weighted by what failure would have cost — life-safety ×3, a statutory obligation ×2.2, the estate itself ×1.5, an evaluation ×1. Every project declares which of those it was, so each ridge traces to an entry you can open and disagree with. Only the work that used this technology is counted, so what shows here is the company it kept rather than the record around it. Height and color are on the record-wide scale rather than this page’s own, so a modest estate draws a modest landscape and any two of these pages can be read against each other.

Architected the SCADA system and its connectivity for JEA, the municipal electric and water utility, across every water treatment and wastewater facility it operated, including two redundant sites — the main building and a remote location — so the control systems stayed up when one of them did not.

On the treatment side the stakes are physical rather than informational. Hydrogen accumulates, and if the ventilation fans stop and nobody knows they have stopped, the building becomes an explosion risk. A SCADA network carrying that kind of signal is not a monitoring convenience — it is what stands between a sensor reading and somebody getting hurt, which is why the redundancy went in before anything else did.

Also: networking every electrical substation in Duval County so a collection of unmanned, scattered, individually critical sites could be operated as one system, and power metering with PIE to identify conductor sag from loading or vegetation encroachment — the point of which was never the meter data but a crew dispatched to a specific span before the span found its own way of telling somebody.

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Also searched as

  • IoT
  • Internet of Things
  • Industrial IoT
  • IIoT
  • M2M
  • machine to machine
  • OT security
  • ICS security
  • Purdue model
  • IT/OT segmentation

Instrumented plant, metering, roadside and building devices reporting over a network — the practice the term was coined for, two decades before it had the name.