Dartford River Crossing
The
Dartford River Crossing is THE DARTFORD TUNNELS and THE QUEEN
ELIZABETH BRIDGE complex which cross the River Thames about 25km
east of London. The crossing links the counties of Essex and Kent forming
a strategic part of the Southeast of England motorway and trunk road network.
A Panorama based SCADA system was designed, installed and commissioned to replace a non Year 2000 compliant DOS based system.
The new system comprised two SCADA servers, operating in a dual redundant configuration with 13 client PC's all running Windows NT4 workstation. The system utilised the installed office network (100Mbps Ethernet) for communications. The I/O was approximately 1800 of digital and analogue information covering such control functions as tunnel ventilation, power distribution, meteorological data, electric pumps, bridge lighting, diesel generators, I/O diagnostics etc. Additionally software modules were written to provide night watchman and gate access security systems. Field equipment was interfaced to the system via 10 networks of I/O modules which were serial linked via 16 channel multiport PCI interface cards installed in the SCADA server PC's. An OPC software driver provided the necessary protocol to pass data between the I/O and the SCADA package.