Remote Alarm Monitoring & Remote Process Control

Prodigy MobileScada installation at Chancelot Mill, Edinburgh

Chancelot Mill is the second largest flour mill in Europe and one of nine mills in the Allied Mills group. The mill operates, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to supply Scottish bakers with quality flours and bakery ingredients.

As the mill works continuously any process disturbance such as a breakdown, emergency stop or fire alarm needs to be dealt with quickly or the whole plant is soon brought to a standstill. Fast response to alarms is therefore critical to operations and is dependent on good communications.

The mill covers a six-acre site and staff can be anywhere on site when an alarm is raised. Reduced manning levels on evenings and holiday periods increases the need for a reliable method of alarm handling.

A paging system was used for several years. However a paged alarm involved staff breaking off from whatever work they were doing, finding the nearest telephone to respond to the pager before dealing with the alarm elsewhere on site.

Recently the paging system became too old to be supported and the decision was made to provide staff with mobile phones. Kilbryde Communications, their mobile phone provider, was asked to source a mobile phone based system that would replace the paging system.

The solution came in the form of MobileScada.
MobileScada uses the SMS (Short Message Service) text facility on mobile cellular phones for interactive remote alarm handling and remote process control. It allows users to receive and accept alarms, wherever they are on the site, straight from their mobile phone. This gives instant acceptance of alarms, faster response to disturbances and is more convenient and time saving for users.

Flexible alarm and user management allows alarms to be grouped and alarm messages to be sent to specific users. This ensures that the right person gets the right alarm every time. Log on and log off to the system can be done by users from their mobile phones or programmed automatically for specified users.

Remote Process Control

MobileScada can provide users with information on demand. Users can call up process information in the form of mini reports. This makes it very convenient to monitor critical operations. Also the ability to call up, view and modify any process value at any time allows true remote process control.

MobileScada can inform users when an alarm has been acknowledged. This is useful if several users receive the same alarm and stops response to an alarm being duplicated. Similarly "reversion to normal" status messages can be sent to users if required.

Chancelot Mill are developing their system in house to make full use of MobileScada's range of facilities. A current project for a lone worker safety scheme will include the use of the failsafe feature that guards against an alarm remaining unaccepted.

Should this occur MobileScada can automatically initiate safety procedures. These can range from simply triggering an alarm annunciator to activating an emergency shut down. This will help to safeguard both staff and plant processes.

MobileScada runs on a standard PC and GSM modem and is capable of handling between 1 and 4000 signals, alarms or process measurements. It is a true "industrial strength" product being based on the Prodigy suite of industrial automation software.

Prodigy has a range of industry standard protocols and specialised equipment drivers for direct connection to control equipment ensuring fast real time response.

The turnkey MobileScada system was installed and commissioned in one day with no disruption to the mill operation.

If you have an application and would like more information please contact us.