Case Studies

All Categories

Ignition Programming for a Geographically Distributed Renewable Energy Firm

Posted in HMI and SCADA, Manufacturing Automation and Intelligence, Oil and Gas Engineering

Summary

DMC’s client is a market leader in the Landfill Gas (LFG) sector. In addition to engineering, design, and construction, this client offers operations and maintenance services for LFG facilities. Collectively they own and operate 40+ LFG facilities across 17 states. Geographically, their facilities span the entire continental US from California to New York.

This client utilizes Ignition to monitor operations at their facilities, capture extensive historical data, and automatically generate important compliance reports.

Solution

DMC was brought on to evaluate the client’s existing system, provide ongoing support, implement additional functionality, and improve system reliability. In addition, DMC has worked with the client to integrate new data sources into the Ignition system, update compliance reports, and troubleshoot network connectivity issues.

After understanding the client’s needs and identifying the shortcomings of the existing system, DMC worked with the client to establish a standardized hub and spoke architecture which will be implemented at all new facilities and retroactively at existing facilities. This architecture is designed from the ground up to avoid any loss of compliance data.  As shown in Figure 1 below, each site will have a remote Ignition gateway server. These remote gateways can store data the event of a communication loss. All of that data is seamlessly transferred to the central Ignition server once communication is restored.

ignition designer
Figure 1: Ignition Hub & Spoke Architecture

The client was very satisfied, and DMC will continue to provide ongoing support and new feature requests for their system. 

Learn more about our Ignition Designer Programming expertise. Contact us for more information.

Customer Benefits

Ignition has proved to be an effective platform for this client due to the following strengths:

  • Unlimited licensing model
    • As they scale and add more facilities, the client can integrate as many data points as they want without increasing licensing costs
    • There is no limit to the number of users who can access the system 
  • Flexible report generation
  • Powerful data historian
  • Intuitive trending 
  • Alarming and notification capabilities