Agència Calatana de l’Aigua

Areas of Activity: Information Systems

Sectors of Operation: Freshwaters, Dammed waters

 

 

The Catalan Water Agency (ACA) is the public body attached to the Catalan government’s housing and environment ministry responsible for the integral water cycle. Some of its main functions are:
• Drawing up and reviewing hydrological projects
• Promoting, building and operating hydraulic structures
• Managing, collecting and administering economic resources
• Granting authorizations and concessions
• Monitoring water quality and quantity

The Agency has a remote control centre (RCC) from which signals and systems from the various regional monitoring points (RCPs) are operated, with signals measuring parameters both of water quantity (river, reservoir and canal levels, rainfall, etc.) and water quality (basic physiochemical parameters). Currently more than 500 automatic stations spread about the whole region are supervised from the RCC.

SAMCAT is the system installed at ACA’s remote control centre for the acquisition and monitoring of water cycle data in Catalonia.

SAMCAT came into existence as a system for controlling and monitoring Catalonia’s network of automatic hydrological information system (AHIS) stations. Over time the system has grown and embraced new types of monitoring network, including XACQA (water quality network) and XACWATT (hydroelectric quality control network).

The system’s main object is to acquire data generated by remote devices in the various monitoring networks and to display them graphically to the user, thereby providing the information required in the management of water resources in the following fields:
• Episode management
- Flood monitoring and management
- Pollution episode monitoring and management

• Use management
- Ascertaining the quantity of water resources
- Monitoring and managing flood situations

• Environment management
- Ascertaining the quality of water in the environment

• Inspection management
- Supervision of hydroelectric activity

Currently SAMCAT manages phenomenological information from its own monitoring networks and also integrated networks and external networks. In the former, the monitoring stations are owned by ACA, which is fully responsible for their operation, maintenance and communications. These are those forming the AHIS and XACQA networks. In the integrated networks, the monitoring points are not ACA’s property, but their owners give it direct access so as to allow the Agency to monitor water use, as in the case of the XACWATT network. Finally, the monitoring points of external networks belong to some other public or private body that periodically provides information to the Agency for the purpose of improving water use management. Such is the case of the Catalan Meteorological Service (SMC) and The Ebro River Basin Authority (CHE).

Among SAMCAT’s main users, three departments may be highlighted:
• Department of water resource management, geared to day-to-day resource management, with the chief task of managing alarms generated by flood, drought or pollution episodes
• Environmental monitoring department, which requires the automation of data acquisition so as to be able to survey and monitor the environment and ensure that the quality standards for the various uses are met
• Department of infrastructure control and regulation, which evaluates the state of environmental monitoring systems (in tasks associated with maintenance) and dam operation

Technologically, it is SCADA system based on the Industrial Defender RTAP platform with a high-availability configuration. The system has several specific drivers for IP communication (Tetra, GPRS, WiMax, VSat) with various types of remote device (Motorota, Wit, PC Industrial). It also uses Areal’s TopKapi SCADA for managing communications (GSM/RTC) with datalogger devices (Wit, Bobitectic, Sofrel, Seba, etc.). Moreover it has a specific module developed on Oracle for complex calculations and data storage. As a graphical interface, the user has a web application developed on J2ee architecture. The system also has a set of online services deployed on the Agency’s SOA.