The Evolution of Remote Management and the IoT Revolution in Large Infrastructures and Civil Works.

It is well known that the relationship between the virtual world and the physical world (people, cities, nature) is generating changes at all levels of society. In the world of automation and control of facilities and civil works, these new paradigms are also producing a major change.

This fact is causing some nervousness since, until now, classical civil engineering rarely needed common strategies and synergies with the control departments or with the systematic use of monitoring systems.

The trend of recent years indicates that the digitalization of a facility or project is increasingly perceived as an added value rather than a necessary expense. Within a project of this type, the item dedicated to automation and control is not one of the highest. Even so, the usual client has also learned and knows the return it has: acquiring the necessary information, having remote control, implementing redundant and cyber-secure systems, etc.

This has implied a serious problem for the engineering companies in our country since, being a service to which they were not accustomed, they have found themselves in situations where this small part of the project has caused delays and unplanned expenses that have generated excessive noise, and the expectations of the final client have not been met.

That is why the large engineering companies in our country have had to evolve and get up to date in order to compete, not only among themselves, but also with the systems integrators who have years of experience in this sector. Any engineering company that we visit – which years ago was dedicated almost exclusively to construction and installation – is expanding its systems and automation department as much as possible.

We are all aware that time is money, any delay in the delivery of the final work, whatever the reason, will entail an extra cost. Thus, remote management should work in such a way that development and installation times can be optimized.

From Logitek we have implemented a Hardware integration methodology inspired by object-oriented programming that has been working for years in software development. Working in this way, it is possible to establish a development standard and installation where families of instrumentation or subsystems (HVAC, surveillance, energy management, network elements, etc.) are created, achieving, among other things:

• Reuse the programming code to optimize and minimize development time.
• Objectify the upstream installations, in such a way that if the superior SCADA works following an object-oriented development philosophy (as Wonderware System Platform does), adding an installation is as simple as creating an object that contains the instrumentation standards or ‘mother’ subsystems already created. In this way, its characterization and the configuration of communications with the controller are homogenized.
• Mark the installation, by working in this way, a procedure can be generated for the electrical installer on how the instrumentation should be wired, which allows him to be autonomous, but at the same time be able to follow a guide so as not to make mistakes.
• Be hardware agnostic, by characterizing the elements of the installation, it is indifferent what brand or model of asset is being controlled or supervised since the information that will be served from it upstream will be the same.

We must not forget also the possibilities of improvement in maintenance. The choice of the appropriate equipment together with a way of development that takes it into account previously, facilitates it at various levels:

• Having devices with a longer useful life than the amortization of the project,
• Avoid displacements in case of malfunction – always ensuring the remote connection in a cyber-secure way –.
• In case of need, that it can be the operator himself and not the engineering team who interoperates with the controller to solve the incident.

Continuing to evolve in the optimization of these projects is a priority. The irruption of new technologies and paradigms, added to a portfolio of clients more aware and knowledgeable of the existing possibilities, opens a wide range of possibilities and new projects. We are no longer talking about the classic and necessary projects of water processing and distribution, oil&gas or energy, but also control of very critical infrastructures – tunnels, for example -, geotechnical supervision or the growing environment of Green building, among others.

Putting a concrete example, since December 18, 2018, in Spain any construction project of building with public funding will require the use of the BIM methodology (Business Information Modelling).

Although these processes and models until recently remained in a ‘simple’ 3D representation of a location and to model an installation during its development and construction phase, with the high contextualized information that we have today, will advance greatly towards a continuous and progressive improvement of intelligent facility management projects. How to ensure to provide that data in a correct, continuous, safe and reliable way will be part of the challenge that has to be faced.

Our post about Facility Management on the Logitek Blog will be very useful to complete the information of this one.

Access from here the document of services for engineering of the M2M division of Logitek