A VTScada Case Study at Terrebonne Parish, LA
Located along Louisiana’s gulf coast, Terrebonne Parish has been a center of Cajun culture since the 18th century. Consolidated Waterworks District 1 (CWD1) provides potable water to over 42,000 residential and commercial customers across the Parish.
The Problem – The copper wire landline the utility used to communicate with their lift station network was fragile and expensive to maintain. As a result, they were only able to connect to 134 of their 230 lift stations.
The Solution – The utility had upgraded to VTScada years earlier based, in-part, on the recommendation of a neighboring Parish. In 2024, the Terrebonne SCADA Department took advantage of VTScada’s built-in edge features to replace CWD1’s landline I/O network with secure Cellular using MQTT Sparkplug B. This change from traditional polling to a publish/subscribe edge model has reduced the utility’s communications costs by two thirds and will allow them to connect the remainder of their lift stations.
Initial SCADA Upgrade
Kevin Smith is a Wireless Automation Director with ELPRO Technologies and is based in their office in Metairie, Louisiana. Before joining the company, six years earlier, he had been part of the team that initially converted Terrebonne Parish to VTScada, an advanced fully integrated SCADA platform by Trihedral. At that time, their priority was to replace aging legacy software but even then, Smith saw the need to eventually upgrade their communication network. “I worked with the utility’s integrator to convert them to ELPRO hardware and implement VTScada,” notes Smith. “They had won the project partly due to VTScada’s newly released built-in MQTT Sparkplug B features. It was perfect timing.”
A Positive Recommendation
When evaluating SCADA software products, CWD1 turned to one of their trusted neighbors for a recommendation. “Terrebonne Parish was looking at who in the area was doing what,” recalls Smith. “About an hour away, Jefferson Parish was in the process of replacing the same legacy SCADA software.” They had chosen VTScada and were happy to tell Terrebonne all about its pre-integrated features and ease of connectivity. “They chose to go the same route as Jefferson Parish and that’s how that came about.”
Moving to the Edge
ELPRO Technologies is an international manufacturer that specializes in designing, manufacturing, and supporting industrial wireless communication and control solutions. Once Smith came to work for ELPRO, he had the chance to revisit the issue of the Terrebonne’s slow I/O network. “What they were doing was using Modbus to poll all the radios via that landline,” he explains. “It could take up to 30 minutes to get updates. I pitched having a modem, communicating at the edge, that would reduce the cost of that landline and get secure network, also using MQTT and pushing it to an edge device.”
Network architecture of a Water/WasteWater application at Terrebonne Parish that replaces landline communications with Cellular communications using MQTT Sparkplug B for 134 lift stations.
Leveraging MQTT and Sparkplug B on the Edge
Smith describes in detail the design of the completed edge-based system pictured above. “The SCADA System is VTScada where there is a local MQTT Broker running on an Edge Cellular Gateway (ELPRO/641M-4) with a Firewall and a Static SIM card. The remote lift stations consist of two different types, one connected via ModbusRTU via a RS485 to an Automation/Direct D340 PLC and the other one connected via ModbusTCP via Ethernet to a Schneider Electric/M340. Both PLCs are connected to Edge Cellular Gateways (ELPRO/641M-2) and transport the data over a cellular network using a multi-vendor dynamic SIM card via MQTT Sparkplug B.”
“The function of the Modbus Master in this network architecture has been moved from within VTScada to the Edge Cellular Gateway which improved the update from once every 30 minutes to when the data changes (Report on Exception). Within the VTScada application, there is a MUX created to allow for a redundant source which is another redundant MQTT Broker pair or an unlicensed 900MHz radio.”
“The VTScada application also has a redundant pair. Within the MQTT driver and tag creation, VTScada is reading, writing, and providing historical data via MQTT Sparkplug B. The VTScada application is using the Common Namespace to replace the data structure used for the older Modbus poll. A VPN connection via OpenVPN is also configured to be able to view the VTScada application from up to 5 Thin Clients on a PC, Smartphone and/or Tablet.”
Ongoing Benefits
The completed design provided a more secure solution that could easily scale with their needs. The most important benefit is described succinctly by Smith, “The Return on Investment of the total project reduced the monthly communications bill by two thirds.”
About VTScada – VTScada.com
About ELPRO Technologies – https://elprotech.com