Romanian Hydro Plants Power Up with QNX

Until the mid-90s, most Romanian hydro plants worked with outdated equipment that, besides being difficult to use, provided little fault tolerance. But now, with a SCADA from ICE FELIX, a Bucharest-based computer manufacturer, over 30 hydro plants on the Olt River in Romania have a flexible and reliable three-tier network of QNX computers to handle operations.

The first tier consists of a network at each facility that runs QNX Windows-based graphical applications for monitoring and control. This network is in turn connected to the second tier, a central process computer (also running QNX) that controls and monitors the activity of hydro devices, performs data acquisition, and communicates via modem with the third tier, the central "Dispatch Point."

The Dispatch Point is a network of computers at an off-site location that receives data, generates reports, and controls all activities of the plants it oversees. From this network, the dispatcher can monitor the global status of each plant. The network also runs graphical applications for statistics and report generation to optimize work scheduling at the plants.

Initially, ICE FELIX started developing this application under MS Windows, but switched over to QNX when the company realized they weren't getting the realtime performance, solid connectivity options, multitasking, and, above all, fault tolerance they needed. QNX's modularity, transparent networking, and interprocess communication based on messages and shared memory were also contributing factors to their switch to QNX - with these capabilities ICE FELIX quickly developed drivers for I/O devices and process servers for communication.

The SCADA application currently controls hydro plants on the Olt River, but because it has been so successful, there are plans to expand to many more hydro plants in Romania in the near future. Hydro plants aren't the only target for ICE FELIX's application, however. Because the SCADA system is fully portable, it can be adapted easily for use in other facilities such as thermo-electric power stations and chemical manufacturing plants.