ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

Exxaro has standardised on AVEVA System Platform (formerly Wonderware) as their operational technology and they preferred to use the toolset provided by IS³ to ensure an off-the-shelf technology for the information modelling tool. Also, the concept of instantiation of predefined templates suited the hierarchical requirements of the information model.

Exxaro selected Control Systems Integration (CSI) for the implementation of the project. “Prior to this project, no information modelling tool existed at the mine,” says CSI director Dries van Schalkwyk. “We used the standard off-the-shelf ArchestrA scripting environment to develop the object templates, providing a standard and open system which is easy to configure and maintain. The information modelling objects were developed in line with the S95/S88 conventions. This tool was then used to generate the configuration and availability rules for AVEVA MES Performance. We also used InTouch as the human-machine interface for the information modelling tool.”

ArchestrA-based System Platform provided CSI with the flexibility to build object model templates that could be used to define the information model and its properties to meet Exxaro’s specific needs. In addition, the system’s version control and flexibility allowed the generation of objects that enforced compliance with the best practices as well as standardisation of the methodology and business process required to define the information model.

“The object-oriented nature of ArchestrA and its template development facilities enabled us to develop flexible objects that could be reused through instantiation, thereby saving time and cost in engineering and maintenance,” says van Schalkwyk.

With every new version of an information block, an XML file is created. This allows the redeployment of the objects without dropping any information. The XML file can then be imported into an Excel template for printing which makes the approval process a lot easier.

• Reduced engineering cost
• Reduced paperwork
• Traceability and version control of information
• Automatic documentation of the information model, rules and requirements,
• Easier and shorter implementation of the business process
• Reduction in the schedule for business rule definition and approval
• Easier formulation of rules for the control system
• Automatic collation of needed information
• Ease of maintenance
• Uniform naming standard
• Empowered end user

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

Windhoek, Namibia

Optimal utilities management contributes to a greener environment and a healthier bottom line at Namibia Breweries Limited (NBL) where AVEVA Historian from IS³ helps to generate daily, weekly and monthly consumption reports for water, electricity, chemicals, thermal energy, solar generation, carbon dioxide and air and to compare results with KPI targets.

Linking Historian tags to the company’s production system has also led to faster and more accurate problem detection.

Background
With regard to renewable energy, NBL has put into practice what others only talk about. The company has a 1MW roof-mounted solar plant with more than 4000 panels, 66 inverters and 4 cluster controllers. The whole system is connected to three of the company’s generator sections. When it was installed in 2013, it was the largest hybrid system in the world and it also made NBL completely self-sufficient regarding electrical power.

But this was only the start. Electricity, though a major component, is only one factor in the complex world of utilities which, today, are highly significant contributors to product costs, competitiveness and profitability. And there’s more to effective utilities management than simply watching the meter.

A Manufacturing Operations Management Survey conducted by LNS Research showed that the top two operational challenges for meeting Strategic Manufacturing Objectives were that companies had to deal with disparate systems and the lack of cooperation across their different departments.

“In our case, we have the brewing, packaging and distribution departments,” says André Engelbrecht, Manager: Industrial Control Systems, NBL “Each of them focuses on doing their job to the best of their ability but without necessarily much concern for the common denominator that makes it all possible; utilities.”

And so NBL decided to unify their various departments into a cohesive entity that could make real-time business decisions with regard to utility usage based on a single version of the facts.

The scope of the implementation would include access to the CO2 plant, NH3 Ammonia cooling, boiler house, water treatment plant, sterile air plant and power meters.

Implementation

The project was started in February 2015 and changeover to the new system was done after a two-week parallel operation during January and February 2016. But according to Engelbrecht, this is not the end as it is a “living” system designed to grow and supply the company’s information needs well into the future.

NBL has a central DCS which controls the beer-making process from beginning to end but achieving NBL’s goals of accurate decision support based on reality and real-time production information, more data collection and collation resources would be needed.

“It was vitally important that we got the buy-in from all stakeholders regarding the value of doing this, after which we decided to use the power of AVEVA Historian and the scripting capabilities of Historian Client,” says Engelbrecht.

“We also installed Software Toolbox’s TOP Server to retrieve data from our utility plants and systems and used the DCS to build a SCADA system. We then developed a web-reporting system for production personnel and a dashboard system for management. Most of our physical servers are now hosted in a virtual environment and this has made things a lot easier, such as time synchronization between the old Historian and the OPC server.”

NBL configured a virtual enterprise consisting of two TOP Servers (to balance the load of more than 100 PLCs and systems), one DataHub Server, AVEVA Historian, the main historian data warehouse and a web server. A secure HTTPS dashboard server enables management to view daily and monthly sales and operational KPIs from anywhere and weekly real-time stock volumes are sent to NBL’s advanced planning system using Historian Client queries. SAP files are imported daily regarding sales, production, logistics and depot information.

The system lets qualified personnel view various utility consumption and production information at the same time wherever they may be. They’re also able to view daily, weekly and monthly consumption information on the same platform. In future NBL will be able to switch off non-critical plant equipment to ensure that their maximum demand remains below target.

“It is great to see what can be done with technology and data when you use the right tools such as the [AVEVA] products we implemented in this project. It was also a great learning experience to combine the products we chose to enable us to make our end-results and user-experience better and more effective,” says Annemarie Kruger, MES/MIS Specialist, NBL.

“In my opinion, some of the most outstanding features of the system include its open standards, the wide range of drivers available, its scalability (as big as we want to go) as well as its ease of use, customisation and integration facilities with other initiatives,” adds Engelbrecht. “This implementation was all about 80% planning and 20% implementation. AVEVA’s Customer FIRST Support Programme is a must and the support from IS³ and Software Toolbox was outstanding.”

About Namibia Breweries Limited (NBL)

As part of the Ohlthaver & List (O&L) Group, the company is proud to uphold the tradition established in 1516 and brew their beer according to the Reinheitsgebot Purity Law resulting in products renown for their incomparable quality and purity.

The exceptional brands in their portfolio continues to garner international recognition, winning a series of gold medals during the prestigious Deutsche Landwirtschafts Gesellschaft (DLG) Awards.

And it’s quite a portfolio, comprising 11 brands including Windhoek, Tafel, Hansa, Heineken and Amstel to name a few.

In 2019, NBL celebrated its 100th birthday

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

Exxaro has standardised on AVEVA System Platform (formerly Wonderware) as their operational technology and they preferred to use the toolset provided by IS³ to ensure an off-the-shelf technology for the information modelling tool. Also, the concept of instantiation of predefined templates suited the hierarchical requirements of the information model.

Exxaro selected Control Systems Integration (CSI) for the implementation of the project. “Prior to this project, no information modelling tool existed at the mine,” says CSI director Dries van Schalkwyk. “We used the standard off-the-shelf ArchestrA scripting environment to develop the object templates, providing a standard and open system which is easy to configure and maintain. The information modelling objects were developed in line with the S95/S88 conventions. This tool was then used to generate the configuration and availability rules for AVEVA MES Performance. We also used InTouch as the human-machine interface for the information modelling tool.”

ArchestrA-based System Platform provided CSI with the flexibility to build object model templates that could be used to define the information model and its properties to meet Exxaro’s specific needs. In addition, the system’s version control and flexibility allowed the generation of objects that enforced compliance with the best practices as well as standardisation of the methodology and business process required to define the information model.

“The object-oriented nature of ArchestrA and its template development facilities enabled us to develop flexible objects that could be reused through instantiation, thereby saving time and cost in engineering and maintenance,” says van Schalkwyk.

With every new version of an information block, an XML file is created. This allows the redeployment of the objects without dropping any information. The XML file can then be imported into an Excel template for printing which makes the approval process a lot easier.

• Reduced engineering cost
• Reduced paperwork
• Traceability and version control of information
• Automatic documentation of the information model, rules and requirements,
• Easier and shorter implementation of the business process
• Reduction in the schedule for business rule definition and approval
• Easier formulation of rules for the control system
• Automatic collation of needed information
• Ease of maintenance
• Uniform naming standard
• Empowered end user

Advansys has a good knowledge of the Food and Beverage industry in general and the brewing industry in particular. “[Their] specific advantage is knowledge of not only the beer making process but also the manufacturing system architecture that we use such as our eQMS, which is our quality/MES system,” says du Toit.

In addition, if any custom development had to be done, the expert use of the ArchestrA Application Object Toolkit was important. This gives the ability for any custom development to conform with SAB’s architecture and standards while making it easy for the engineers at regional level to understand and maintain the system.

“Lastly, AVEVA Intelligence is a Business Intelligence tool and Advansys’s knowledge of data warehousing was important to understand and implement the project on a tight timeline,” concludes du Toit.

Implementation

“Starting at the regional level, we wanted to make use of the existing infrastructure at the regions and did not want to introduce anything that would affect the performance of the historians, application object servers or even the PLCs,” says du Toit.

The project team drew up the required regional system architecture shown in figure 1 which collates KPIs from the PLCs as well as the Historians and MES servers for storage in the regional data warehouse from which it can be extracted and viewed in dashboard form according to the needs of users.

This regional architecture was replicated seven times for each of the regions and connected to the central data warehouse at head office, where the dashboard views not only represent an aggregated picture but also allow drilling down to the views of each region independently.

“SAB stipulated that we make use of the existing ArchestrA System Platform install-base, providing centralised change management, change propagation and it’s user-friendly Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for all data retrieval configuration,” says Advansys Director Graeme Welton.

The main reasons for this were that SAB didn’t want another system to maintain and ArchestrA is already the standard system control platform at all the breweries. Systems engineers are familiar with its IDE and the System Platform provides built-in change propagation and object derivation, a deployment installation model as well as an integral security model. In other words, everything was in place to allow Advansys to focus on the Intelligence application and not spend engineering time on fundamentals.

This phase of project Dash focused on collecting and collating diagnostic data with respect to system performance, traffic volumes, CPU usage, scan times, memory usage, message status (MSMQ), I/O Server item counts (total, active, etc.), disc space availability, unprocessed SQL messages and many more. This would include everything from the PLC, Server Platform, the process and the ArchestrA engine to the I/O Server, the file system, Microsoft Message Queue and any SQL database (MES).

“Because of the nature of this data, most of which comes from operating system diagnostics, as well as SAB’s requirement to use ArchestrA, we decided to use the ArchestrA Object Toolkit which gave us full use of the ArchestrA Object Framework and access to low-level C#.Net coding,” says Welton. “This approach also allowed us to use standard, out-of-the-box alarm and history primitives and compile editors for easy configuration. This all meant that no scripting was required for engineers to configure the data retrieval objects.”

Welton believes that the dashboard development tool is much more than it appears at first and that IS³ has produced a solution whereby almost anyone with some basic training can collect and collate information from virtually any combination of sources to suit their needs. “This is rather different from traditional Business Intelligence tools that require large IT teams to support and develop.”

Benefits

“I feel I should comment on three important aspects of the project,” says du Toit. “First of all, time; after the testing and development phase, we were able to roll out the project to the rest of the sites and commission within 2 months! 

This is a reflection on the power of the underlying ArchestrA technology. Then there’s the matter of cost. The time saved with the project roll-out had a direct impact on the cost and we were able to finish within budget. The third point is the exceptional quality of the work delivered by Advansys.”

• One immediate benefit was risk reduction. With an immediate view of the status of each system, engineers were able to detect issues that impact performance of the various systems under scrutiny.
• Cross-platform comparison and analysis make decision making easy when deciding on deployment of areas.
• Cross-regional analysis shows trends and areas to focus on for development or where support should be given.

Goals
The integration of a vast and geographically distributed information network to support regional and central decision-making
Remote measurement of mission-critical variables such as water flow and quantity, pH, turbidity, chlorine levels, conductivity, reservoir levels and pipeline pressures
Calculation of water balances in order to assist with the identification of problem areas, faulty instruments as well as the calculation of the network’s efficiency in future

Solutions and Products
AVEVA System Platform
AVEVA InTouch
AVEVA Historian

Results
A single and integrated business view and control of Rand Water’s extensive network assets through the integration of its insular control systems

Background
Established in 1903, Rand Water is the largest water utility in Africa, delivering on average 3.5 million tons (3500 million litres) of some of the purest drinking water in the world to approximately 11 million people every day through local authorities, large industries and mines. The success of such an operation depends on the smooth running of a vast distribution network spanning 18 000 km2 plus 13 000 km2 of which is shared with other water utilities. With an annual turnover of more than R3 billion and assets in excess of R5 billion, customer satisfaction through the effective management, control and utilisation of its water delivery infrastructure is top of the agenda at Rand Water.

The Rand Water network consists of 2 major water treatment sites, 13 booster pumping stations, 3000 km of pipelines, 32 storage reservoirs and approximately 1500 customer meters (e.g. municipalities).

This network is supervised by a wide range of control systems including a variety of PLCs, SCADA systems, meters as well as a diverse range of data networks and protocols.

Rand Water’s province-sized “shop floor” required an approach that would help it integrate control and collate information in order to optimise the use of existing assets and streamline infrastructure utilisation. The time had come to aggregate the information from the distributed databases and to make this information available to operational management for monitoring the whole operation of bulk water supply throughout Rand Water’s network at a glance. This was the start of the ArchestrA-based Rand Water Control Centre project.

The project goals include:

• Remote measurement of mission-critical variables such as water flow and quantity, pH, turbidity, chlorine levels, conductivity, reservoir levels and pipeline pressures.
• Calculation of water balances in order to assist with the identification of problem areas, faulty instruments as well as the calculation of the network’s efficiency in future.
• Central monitoring of water quantity and quality
• Central overview / dashboard of operations
• Central alarming and reporting
• Integration of a variety of disparate systems
• Linking up systems and meters not yet on the LAN/WAN

‘Due to its scope, the Control Centre project is more of a journey rather than a project,’ says Les Lange of Rand Water. ‘What appealed to us about Wonderware’s ArchestrA, was that it provided the “Galaxy” concept for the unification of networks and information repositories through a single transparent tag name database. Although they are geographically distributed over the whole of Gauteng and beyond, we can now treat all our sites as a single entity or Galaxy. This will eliminate islands of information and present us with a unified and centralised information repository that is available to all. This approach is also leading to an easier development and deployment of standards through a central control point that is also facilitating software change management. The other reasons we chose Wonderware are their large installed base both locally and world-wide as well as the strong local support and availability of skills.’

Most KPIs defined at the start of the project are now available, the various disparate systems are being integrated and the operations staff are very satisfied with developments.

‘We’ve found integration with ArchestrA to be easy,’ says Dries van Schalkwyk of Control Systems Integration. ‘DDE, Suitelink, OPC … anything goes. The ArchestrA environment is also helping to reduce engineering costs through the development, deployment and maintenance of standards such as the S88 naming convention. These now apply to the whole organisation.’

ArchestrA’s use of object technology means that the information, control, alarming and other criteria for plant items such as pumps and valves is defined in a template. If a change is required, only the template needs to be edited and this change will then automatically propagate to every instance of that item in the network. ‘This makes it easy to define and maintain standards and also reduces engineering costs when installing a new plant or maintaining an existing plant,’ adds Lange.

The Rand Water ArchestrA area model (Figure 3) consists of geographical areas and sites (treatment sites, booster pumping stations, pipelines and storage reservoirs) as well as distribution zones (pipeline service areas).

‘We see ArchestrA as an excellent solution for our needs,’ says Lange. ‘It maps well to our primary objective of an integrated and unified “shop floor” and provides the necessary infrastructure to safeguard our extensive existing investments and assets.’

Goals
The implementation of an enterprise-wide power control solution that would meet Sibanye-Stillwater’s geographically-distributed needs

Challenges

• A singular application that spanned across and satisfied the needs of all Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
• Perform automated load shifting
• Automated load clipping
• Centrally-managed control of the system, its equipment, and its schedules
• Continue operation in spite of network outages

Results

• The SCADA system is now a single application spanning across all of Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
• Management has access to all data and information across the enterprise
• Centralised energy control
• Flexible system
• More deployments of this successful solution into new mines

Solutions & Products

• AVEVA System Platform
• AVEVA InTouch
• AVEVA Historian
• AUVESY-MDT AutoSave for System Platform

South Africa and Zimbabwe
A key cost factor in mining is electrical energy and Sibanye-Stillwater’s extensive, geographically-dispersed operations involved in the mining of gold, platinum and uranium, uses a lot of it. So much so that they saw the need for a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to the problem to replace the discrete and numerous solutions that had evolved over the years.

Background
Sibanye purchased a number of mines, each of which had evolved their own solution to the power management problem over many years. In fact, all these solutions added up to no less than 39 stand-alone applications across the company’s operations.

“Multiple energy control projects at the different operations resulted in many proprietary third-party systems being used for scheduling,” says P.J. Jansen van Rensburg, ICT Manager, Networks and Engineering Systems, Sibanye-Stillwater. “Any energy control schedule configuration was done in isolation of the others and their inflexibility caused some contradictory control problems such as different priorities seen from the perspective of the solution vendors – even at the same site. This resulted in management not having access to all applications and their information.”

But the problems didn’t end there. Sibanye-Stillwater’s production activities were not synchronised with Eskom’s tariff structures with regard to load shifting (moving the load demand to non-peak times) and load clipping (limiting the load to set limits). And lastly, there was no standardisation across all 32 SCADA systems in use at the time.

Implementation
Sibanye-Stillwater launched an initiative to implement an enterprise-wide power control module that would meet the following criteria:

Consist of a singular application that spanned across and satisfied the needs of all Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
Perform automated load shifting
Maintain usage within limits at all times (automated load clipping)
Provide centrally-managed control of the system, its equipment and its schedules
Continue operation in spite of network outages
“We chose a decentralised infrastructure model, which meant that, in the event of a hardware failure, only the local site would be affected while each Sibanye operation, shaft and PLC would be able to run independently in case of a communication failure,” says van Rensburg. “The solution that ticked all the boxes was [AVEVA’s] System Platform.”

“To better understand what the total power control module needed to do, it’s important to understand Eskom’s two-part tariff system,” says van Rensburg. “This consists of Load Shifting which means scheduling machinery to either stop working altogether or run unloaded during Eskom’s peak periods (18:00 to 20:00 in summer and 17:00 to 19:00 in winter – 2.5 times the rate for non-peak consumption). Then there’s Load Clipping which is done by unloading machinery during Eskom’s peak and standard tariff periods as per set targets.”

So schedules were created, configured and activated to cope with Load Shifting while targets were set and algorithms created and deployed to handle the Load Clipping aspect of power control. “Because of its real-time nature, we still can’t do Load Clipping during network failure,” explains van Rensburg. “But Load Shifting is no longer a problem because a register for the next 20 operations is programmed into the PLC every few seconds which means that it can continue to independently shift loads for up to a week if necessary.”

“Standardisation is crucial to operator efficiency it they change plants but it also provides a standardised communication ‘language’ and understanding between everyone involved who all have access to this production information. This lets them benchmark and compare their accomplishments to other plants because they all share a common standard for performance,” says van Rensburg.

Results

• The current SCADA system is now a single application spanning across all of Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations.
• Management now has access to all data and information across the enterprise.
• All energy control projects can be controlled centrally and projects are underway to move to central control.
• This system is flexible enough to allow for continuous improvements and savings.
• Sibanye has acquired more mines and the system is being successfully implemented into these new ventures

About Sibanye-Stillwater
Sibanye-Stillwater owns and operates high-quality gold and platinum operations in South Africa – consolidated into one Group with one vision and strategy. The long-term success of Sibanye-Stillwater as a business and as a responsible corporate citizen is dependent on all stakeholders working together as one.