Products 4 Automation’s Movicon™ SCADA is providing an open, flexible & low cost way to cut facilities management costs at the Leonardo Shopping Centre, near Rome, the biggest and most modern in Italy. The Movicon platform is delivering the benefits of centralised monitoring of assets to facilities managers at the Centre, enabling the integration and monitoring of building features such as climate, lighting, heating, electrical distribution and many more.
The Leonardo Shopping Centre covers an area of almost 100,000 sq metres, housing a hypermarket and 210 shops on two floors. The two entities, shops and hypermarket, have independent systems engineering; each one controlled and supervised by two supervisory PCs using Movicon Scada/HMI with connected subsystems.
The various subsystems are connected through supervisory workstations, which are linked through three distinct buses. The heating control systems use a LON network; the air conditioning systems use a Modbus network; and the illumination and distribution systems use a PLC on a Profibus network. Each subsystem is connected to the Movicon supervisor, where information is brought together through fieldbuses.
The complete energy, power and light distribution system is managed through thirty-five local electrical cabinets, connected on a Profibus network and managed by Siemens PLCs, which provide arcade illumination, technological services and water and HVAC system management.
One part of the control that manages the Shop sector uses a LON network, with Siemens control systems to regulate the heating and cooling system, comprising one thermal power station and four evaporative cooling towers serving each of the 210 shops’ air treatment units (ATU).The cooling system and ATU connect to twenty-four roof-top air conditioners on a Modbus network.
The overall control system for the Shopping Centre has been designed with a focus on saving and managing energy. This is evidenced in the heating system, where the temperature conditions in each single shop are monitored by a PID controller that makes sure the correct temperatures are maintained. In the same way, The roof-top air conditioners are integrated into the control system in such as way as to ensure that the correct level of heat energy, in each of the various areas covered by the rooftop units, is maintained according to pre-set points, which are determined based on factors such as crowd loadings and busy days of the week.
The same energy saving methodology has also been applied to the light control system, where the quantity of natural light and artificial light are monitored and controlled to achieve the correct level of light intensity to meet changing external environmental conditions.
All data relating to electric power distribution and consumption at the Mall is gathered by the Movicon supervisor and historically logged, enabling the Movicon analytical network tools to diagnose and undertake precise analysis to optimise electrical power consumption, based upon the time of day and the size of crowds. The whole distribution system is managed on decentralised basis by thirty-seven CPUs with input/output distribution on a fieldbus.
Systems engineering- wise, the autonomous hypermarket control, monitoring and supervisory system is very similar to that of the shopping centre. The hypermarket uses a thermo-regulation system with its own central heating; a cooling system with central cooling comprising three groups of coolers and ten rooftop air conditioners; an electric and light distribution system; and a HVAC (air treatment unit) system.
Open Movicon Supervisory System
The Progea Movicon supervisory system that oversees both shopping and hypermarket systems is an open Scada platform that has allowed system engineers at the Leonardo centre to centralise all subsystem information, even though the data form the subsystems derives from various bus system types with different technologies.
Once collected centrally, the data is distributed to the other supervisory client stations, which are located over the information system’s Ethernet network. This allows users to interact from different locations, and with different access privileges. Daytime access is reserved for system managers, while the client station is overrode at night, so that access is granted to night watch users only. Different types of access have different command privilege limits, with a very transparent and complete alarm management and easy to follow indications on carrying out resets autonomously.
About P4A
Products4Automation (P4A) is a specialist supplier of new and innovative software and hardware solutions to the UK market. Product ranges available from P4A include the latest touch-screen HMI’s and flat panel PCs, SCADA software and plug-ins, a wide range of SCADA enabled hardware, Alarm plug-in software for large automation systems, and a full range of Production Intelligence software solutions.
