Managing Facility Operations for 140 Buildings Across Multiple Campuses at the University of Strasbourg in France

The University of Strasbourg in Strasbourg, France, is among Europe’s foremost research universities and is the second-largest university in France with some 43,000 students. The University’s Energy Department needed to better manage facility operations for 140 buildings on multiple campuses spread across 60 miles of Strasbourg and the surrounding area. No centralized method existed for monitoring and collecting data on assets, HVAC, electricity and other facility processes that would allow staff to review trends and identify better practices for saving time, money and energy.

 

 

"Wonderware System Platform enables the University’s Energy Department to successfully manage operations at our 140 buildings by accurately processing technical data in real-time for assessment. We can now more effectively manage University assets and operations ensuring the comfort of our students, educators, staff and visitors each day."
– Damien Bertrand, Energy Department Manager, University of Strasbourg

 

The search for an open, scalable supervisory control and monitoring system led them to Wonderware® System Platform which provided extensive capabilities and met the University’s need for a solution that collects and manages data from all building systems and assets, and that easily integrated with the University’s existing asset data management program. System Platform efficiently centralizes data gathering and enables extensive data analysis to improve overall asset and energy efficiencies at the University’s distributed campus buildings – everything is built and managed within the same software infrastructure.

Wonderware System Platform also features one of the industry’s most powerful data historian applications, Wonderware Historian, which provides Energy Department staff actionable information with rich data analysis and reporting capabilities. And there is Wonderware InTouch®, an open, extensible supervisory human machine interface (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) solution that provides user-friendly views of the University’s building control systems to staff and management from any location in real-time.

For more information, read the success story or visit our Smart Cities Industry page on software.invensys.com.

Wonderware Software Helps AENA Manage Operations at Barcelona El Prat Airport

The gateway to the beautiful city of Barcelona is the El Prat Airport. In a typical year, over 35 million passengers and 96 thousand tons of cargo pass through the airport. AENA is responsible for the operations of the Barcelona El Prat Airport. AENA is one of the world's top airport operators, in terms of the number of passengers handled. More than 200 million travelers pass through AENA's 46 domestic and 15 international airports.

"Our systems allow us to be aware of what is going on in the airport infrastructures, and we manage the airport as an intelligent environment. The 'smart city' concept is very much in vogue nowadays. We can say without any doubt that the Barcelona airport is a smart airport - intelligent, able to manage its infrastructures and always self-aware."

– José Luis González, Director de Informática  

 

  

 

AENA's smart airport solution boasts a dynamic, intelligent infrastructure. The control environment for the airport management system handles over 1,000,000 signals. It includes the control of all escalators, elevators and passenger moving walkways; power management; air conditioning; and fire safety systems. It also involves monitoring support for the automated luggage transport system. This fully integrated, multi-hardware solution was made possible with the help of Wonderware.

Wonderware System Platform lets AENA manage a large number of processes in an integrated and simultaneous manner under a single platform. It provides an easy-to-use, flexible and scalable solution that allows AENA to create control templates that can easily be deployed by any of its multiple system integrator contractors.

Today, Wonderware is being used in all 46 airports that AENA manages all over Spain.

For more information, watch the new video, read the success story, or visit our Smart Cities Industry page on software.invensys.com.

Remotely Controlling Rail Station Operations in Spain with Invensys Wonderware Software

Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (FGC) is responsible for providing safe, reliable and efficient rail transportation to more than 80 million passengers each year. Operating two of the country’s major transport lines, Barcelona-Vallès and Llobregat-Anoia, FGC must manage not only 120 miles of track, but also the 76 train stations which service the businesses and residents in the region.

 

As a public company managed by the Catalan Regional Government, the mission of FGC is to operate these rail services and infrastructure efficiently and effectively. Based on these goals, the company began an extensive organizational and technological reform strategy to enhance the management of its overall operations.

 

The creation of the Station Monitoring Center, operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, enabled FCG to manage the operation of all stations from a central location. Through the new remote-controlled model, the Center began overseeing the operations of everything related to a station such as ticket vending machines, CCTV, public address system, opening and closing of entrance doors, air conditioning, lighting, and numerous other functions.

 

Integrating all controlled operations into a single supervisory system through a common management interface was the next stage of the project. The Integrated Command Center was created for joint management of the two network Lines – Barcelona-Vallès and Llobregat-Anoia.

 

“The challenge we have set for ourselves as a company is one of excellence in customer service. Each year, we seek to achieve higher satisfaction levels from our users and Wonderware technology is an essential tool in achieving this.”

– Alicia Coca, Head of the Systems Development Department,

   Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya

 

For more information, read the complete success story. Or, reference our collection of Wonderware Transportation Industry success stories.

AENA, Barcelona El Prat Airport

Wonderware Software Facilitates a Decade of Integration and Growth for Unprecedented Spanish Airport Expansion

Spanish Airports and Air Navigation (AENA) is a public company in charge of civil air navigation and airports in Spain. Its subsidiary, AENA Aeropuertos SA, manages 47 airports and two heliports in Spain and participates directly in the management of 28 other terminals throughout the world. In passenger count, AENA is the world’s leading airport operator with about 200 million passengers per year. 

The Barcelona El Prat Airport, together with the Port of Barcelona and the city’s Zona Franca area, serves as a vital hub for the region’s economy and is integral to tourism in the region. Recorded airport traffic in 2010 was 29,209,595 passengers, 277,832 operations and 104,280 tons of cargo.

To modernize the airport and prepare for future demands, major improvements to infrastructure and services have been made.

In 2000, 15 to 20 integrators were engaged in supporting the airport control systems. Each vendor implemented a separate solution, resulting in a multiplicity of technologies. The airport’s operators had to learn all of these different tools, which made it practically impossible for the facility to function smoothly.

Management searched the market for a solution. They wanted a control architecture that would provide:

• A single platform, to unite the control systems of the existing facilities and the future expansions
• Reliability, to support efficient and safe airport operations and avoid downtime in airport services
• Scalability, to handle the addition of a second large terminal building and integrate the annex buildings and other systems into one infrastructure
• Economy, to meet the budget restrictions of a public project

When considering their goals and plans for expansion, the choice for AENA was Wonderware software. It met management’s criteria, plus it offered the only non-proprietary solution, providing a better alternative to disparate systems and the high costs and operator challenges the airport had experienced in the past.

Today, the control environment of the airport is almost completely integrated, AENA is achieving operations excellence, and the Barcelona Airport boasts a dynamic, high-functioning infrastructure. According to the AENA team, the most outstanding benefit so far is that the solution enables them to manage a large number of processes in an integrated and simultaneous manner under a single platform – even with so many devices and signals with distinct technological languages.

“The centralization of operations that we get with Wonderware helps manage around 700,000 signals and is essential for a critical infrastructure like this. We can now quickly respond to incidents and also be proactive in optimizing management.”
– Jordi Asensi, Head of Systems and Database Management, AENA Barcelona Airport

Once the full expansion is complete, nearly 1,000,000 signals will be controlled under the unified platform. With Wonderware technology and the vision and teamwork of numerous executives and integrators, the Barcelona Airport is one of the most emblematic projects for AENA to date, and AENA’s commitment to Wonderware software as their standard for handling the 47 airports they operate in Spain is stronger than ever.

For more information, read the complete AENA, Barcelona El Prat Airport success story and/or reference any of our Wonderware Transportation or Facilities Management success stories.

City of Bremen, Germany, Cuts Energy Consumption and Consolidates Building Management

When the City of Bremen needed to modernize the heating systems in several of its buildings, it analyzed the project and realized an opportunity. Besides improving energy efficiency, there was the potential to implement a new building management system (BMS) that would bring greater control and provide far-reaching positive effects across the city’s extensive portfolio of properties – more than 1,200 municipal facilities covering over 1.8 million square meters (nearly 20 million square feet) of floor space. At the time, six control stations across the city were running a variety of proprietary building control systems, making reporting and sharing of information in a consistent format a challenge, and adding new buildings complicated and costly.

World's Longest High-speed Rail Line Operates on ArchestrA System Platform

In China, more than 220 railway stations across 15 high-speed rail lines are controlled by Invensys software. When the China Ministry of Railways' nation-wide system is completed in 2020, more than 800 stations will be running on Invensys technology solutions throughout a 12,000-kilometer (7,500-mile) rail network.

Combining Transportation and Facilities Management elements on a large scale, this story includes the following successful results:

• The Wonderware System Platform and Wonderware InTouch HMI solution allows the integration of 60 different third-party vendors into each station's Passenger Information System
• New stations can be deployed as needed and configured in as little as one day
• Operational costs have been lowered because personnel can be reduced or allocated more effectively
• Better visibility to the entire system has led to decreased maintenance costs

Read Success Story (pdf)  |  View Success Story Video

 

China targets first batch of Smart Cities

Feb 2013 – Smart Cities in China –  The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development (MOHURD) released a list containing the first batch of pilot smart cities [90, included on list] …

Some figures on IT in smart cities market size: $20Billion USD in 2020 from 6 today

I was recently alerted to this posting from our team in Europe, who continue to find new opportunities in Smart Cities. So just how large is this market?

Take the Train

During the Christmas Holiday break I took a ride on the Metrolink train from Irvine California to LA Station. This got me thinking about how train system operations are managed, which led me to do some research into how SCADA software can be applied to improve the user experience and safety. Here is an example scenario based on several customers we worked with.