Remote - October 2011 - (Page 10)

Applications - Feature Minnesota D.O.T. Makes a Right Turn To a Flexible Monitoring Solution “narrow-band” systems by 2013. For an idea of the demands that population growth will place on MinThe Minnesota State Legislature responded by funding a Motorola 800 nesota’s transportation system, consider the following statistics. In 2010, MHz P25 Trunked Radio Communication System, consisting of more than the Minnesota metro district’s population, which includes the Minneapolis/ 350 tower sites, each a distance of 15 to 20 miles apart, and spread across St. Paul area, totaled almost 3.5 million. By 2030, this region is expected to add over 1 million people, generating 15 million trips the entire state. With the sheer amount of tower sites and limiting factors such as microwave path studies, per day and 86 million vehicle-miles traveled per day, a tower site spacing and land availability MNDOT’s 51 percent increase from 2000 to 2030. For the profestower site locations run the spectrum. Locations such sionals whose job it is to maintain the safety of the as highway right-of-ways, gravel roads, corn fields, state’s roads, these numbers were one catalyst among many, ultimately leading to the development of a unified tops of 50 story buildings and sides of small mountains are all currently in use as tower sites. Certain locations state and local communications network for Minnesota. For the past 50 years, separate government agencies, are so inaccessible that technicians must either use a snowmobile or snow-shoes to gain access during such as the Minnesota State Patrol, the Department of Natural Resources, and MNDOT operated their own the winter. Between these tower sites, OEC maincommand and control structure over separate comtained ARMER (Allied Radio Matrix for Emergency Response), a WAN system of microwave radios that munications networks, often with little to no interoperfunctioned as the state’s public safety radio communiability. The lack of a unified, scalable communications cation system. The Minnesota State Government also network that state agencies could use to coordinate offered partnership use of ARMER to local entities their responses to emergencies was cited as a major such as police, fire and emergency services. ARMER target of reform by the Minnesota State Government. initially exceeded the required 95 percent state terriThe challenge facing these lawmakers was one of tory coverage, but with a new government mandate funding the replacement of an antiquated patchwork of requiring 95 percent of county coverage, additional communication networks with a secure voice network tower site construction was needed. that could grow along with the state’s transportation The Office of Electronic Communications within system. Additional impetus was provided by the Federal MNDOT’s Motorola Trunked Radio Communication MNDOT set out evaluating the state’s current systems Communication Commission’s mandate that all entities Systems were spread across the state, some in remote locations. and began design of the required additions to bring all utilizing “wide-band” VHF and UHF systems move to state agencies together onto a common communications platform. Due to the high degree of importance placed on the reliability of an emergency communications network, one of the steps was to find a company with an established track record of delivering remote monitoring and control solutions, to ensure that the network and its equipment would function properly. After an exhaustive search, MNDOT determined that Asentria units were the best fit given the flexibility requirements. With unit card-slotting capability (up to six available slots depending on the model), OEC had the freedom to customize a solution in a way that made sense for their unique situation. The existing SCADA system in greater Minnesota had 12 inputs, and one of the major requirements for the new system was digital contact inputs. The Motorola SCADA system that is tasked with monitoring the metro area has 48 digital inputs, something the OEC needed to maintain with any new replacement system. The second requirement was a monitoring system that was SNMP-capable. Finally, the unit had to have a high degree of modularity, it had to be able to grow along with the system. This design had several advantages, including the ability to interconnect all of the state agencies into an efficient, simultaneous-use environment. OEC determined that Asentria units were the best fit given these specific requirements. Due to support and cost issues, OEC decided to build the monitoring and control network outside of the existing Motorola network. Asentria was asked to monitor two important items at the tower sites: environmental conditions (generators, smoke detectors, lights, building entries, AC and DC power) and the LAN/WAN backbone equipment. The remote site monitoring solution Asentria delivered to MNDOT included the SNMPlink SL-81 - and its successor, the SiteBoss 530. Featuring a Cisco router at each tower site for connectivity, Asentria’s remote site monitoring solution sends polling and alarm traffic via SNMP to a central collection point. This is then fed into “SMART” (Site Monitoring and Alarm Reporting Tool), an in-house NMS system developed by MNDOT Network Engineer Dave Klema. SMART is set up so that every 15 to 20 seconds the status of each digital input is polled. Because of the inherent outages in the WAN system, sometimes a trap can get lost when the network goes down. The robust multi-threaded environment of the SMART system helps eliminate 10 www.RemoteMagazine.com http://www.radi.com http://www.radi.com http://www.RemoteMagazine.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Remote - October 2011

Remote - October/November 2011
KEMA Named a Seaport-Enhanced Prime Contractor for the US Navy
Opto 22 Releases iOS App for Automation and Control System
Powering Advanced AMR/AMI Networks
Smart, Connected Remote Sites
Minnesota D.O.T. Makes a Right Turn - To a Flexible Monitoring Solution
Reducing Industrial Energy Consumption: Monitoring is the Key
Shacking up in the Artic
AFCON Software and Electronics Released Pulse V1.50 with New Event Manager Add-On
Digi Launches New 3G iDigi Development Kit
Hikvision Launches 650 TVL CCD Day/Night Camera
VYCON Introduces Hybrid VDC XEB Energy Storage System
Crenlo Adds NEMA Wall-Mount Enclosures to Product Lineup
Industry News
Calendar of Events

Remote - October 2011