Overview

The Port River Expressway project was the first stage of a $1 billion program of works initiated by the South Australian Government. The improvements reinforce the Port of Adelaide as a vibrant centre of activity and world-class import/export hub for South Australia.

Solution

SAGE was awarded the contract to provide the Plant Management and Control System (PMCS), which monitors and controls the functions of the bridges.

The PMCS has been designed with remote operation being a key criterion; hence the system architecture was selected to provide a robust, high speed interface capable of operating over long distances, on the existing infrastructure. To achieve this, an Ethernet network was selected as the backbone of the communication system.

The bridge control PLCs (located locally at each bridge) are from the Allen Bradley ControlLogix family enabling excellent Ethernet communications capability. The SCADA system selected was Citect, to provide system redundancy with multiple computers.

Result

The PMCS interfaces with the Transport SA’s Traffic Management System (TMS), providing status information for the bridges and allowing the automatic opening and closing of the bridges through the TMS system.

The PMCS was designed to address many challenging requirements and be fail-safe. At the time of its development it was one of the first control systems designed to allow remote operation of a bridge. It was designed to allow remote operation, local control or emergency control modes.

In 2010 SAGE was recognised for the project, winning the Process and Control Engineering (PACE), Infrastructure Category award