The project involved 4,000 tags, 300 screens, and 10,000 alarms, as well as 25 clients, a number that continues to grow.
As part of this process, system integrator Automation Solutions Ecuador (ASE) had three days to start up Ignition at full operation, along with migrating 10 core PLCs with 2,000 I/Os in the main facilities and at the well sites.ĭuring the three-day migration, controllers were upgraded without altering the commands and animations of the application. It also required that there be no downtime during the move to the new platform operations. Part of Pluspetrol’s approval for the software migration of what was one of Ecuador’s largest SCADA systems, the company required Ignition to work in parallel with the old SCADA applications work for a month. Process information could only be accessed by personnel in the field, who had to generate reports in Excel, limiting its use for administrative and process purposes. Maintenance and updating of the SCADA applications in the stations was uncontrolled, leaving outdated applications without standards and unreliable data which resulted in errors. This system forced each control station to establish an individual connection to the controllers, causing traffic and data loss on the network, which would repeatedly saturate the controllers due to the number of responses they had to generate for each station. The five geographically separated sites in Ecuador have a combined total of 18 workstations, each with its own SCADA system, that have been running for 20 years in a stand-alone architecture.
By replacing its aging SCADA workstations with Inductive Automation’s Ignition, a web-based control and monitoring platform featuring tools for building HMI, SCADA, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems, the company was able to make a 20-year jump into the future in just days. Pluspetrol is a private, independent gas and oil supplier with a presence in Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, the United States, Netherlands, Peru, Suriname, and Uruguay.
A jungle isn’t a place you normally associate with modern automation technology, but for Pluspetrol it was the best way to solve a long-standing problem: How to easily access process information generated by five field sites in the Ecuadorian jungle from its headquarters in Quito.