Consolidation of EPM Group Control Centers

Abstract

Empresas Públicas de Medellín E.S.P. (EPM) is a company with presence in Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Panama, Salvador and Guatemala that operates in the home and related public services sector. Its corporate objective is the provision of electricity generation, transmission, distribution and commercialization services; collection, purification, commercialization and distribution of drinking water; collection and treatment of wastewater and commercialization and distribution of natural gas. furthermore, the company has the capacity to provide waste collection and disposal services. Developing these businesses has resulted in a wide variety of SCADA applications and systems from different manufacturers, architectures, technologies and degrees of obsolescence. Given the size, growth of the company, the critical nature of the services it provides, the variety of the businesses and the number of regions involved, the EPM Group seeks to optimize the operation of its infrastructures, implementing new technologies that allow a centralized multiservice operation using a SCADA platform and advanced market applications. In this context, the EPM Group is developing the Control Center Consolidation Project to update its SCADA technology platform and the associated applications for the operational management of the Electricity, Water and Gas businesses. The resulting architecture seeks to satisfy the current and growing requirements of EPM’s business in Colombia. This article presents the main conceptual bases on which the design and architecture of the systems that are implemented in the referred project are based.