Profile
CBC National
Alarm Center
Overview
North America’s largest broadcast system, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC), broadcasts radio and television in 7 different time zones across Canada. The CBC’s National Alarm Center is responsible for monitoring 900 transmitter sites on a 24/7 basis. In 2003, CBC chose Trihedral Engineering Limited and their flagship product, Visual Tag System (VTS) to provide a SCADA system for monitoring and control of the alarm center. Trihedral Engineering was chosen for its extensive knowledge in the SCADA arena, its ability to communicate with multiple RTU manufacturers’ products and its experience in developing custom designed drivers for standard and non-standard protocols.
Customized features
The system was designed in a joint effort from CBC and Trihedral engineering and operations groups. The resulting application utilized the Visual Tag System’s strengths in networking, alarm management and security management. Many customized features were added in the areas of RTU communication, display management and alarm management and a custom object locking scheme was developed to guarantee users exclusive control rights.
Open Architecture
Trihedral provided a SCADA system capable of management and synchronization of data from over 2000 RTUs and provided a single platform for RTU configuration, alarm monitoring and control. Configuration of RTUs was accomplished by a locking scheme to ensure the integrity of any changes and RTU configuration changes were automatically propagated to all users. The network of field devices included four different types of RTUs, all with non-standard protocols communicating via dialup and RF. The system could also be expanded, at some time in the future, to include RTU communications via TCP/IP. All alarm data was exported to an Oracle database that VTS then used to generate system status reports. The VTS application could be completely configured automatically via imported data from Lotus Notes, which was used by CBC as the site information tool.
Network Redundancy
Because the system was to serve a continent-wide user base, careful consideration was placed on the importance of high availability and correct network loading. The alarm center has a daily operation base of over 50 clients with a user base of more than 150 operators, technicians and management staff. Users communicate through networked servers, clients and Internet nodes. Trihedral engineers utilized the CBC’s existing LAN/WAN infrastructure, placing a pair of redundant servers in a centralized location and using regional servers for specialized tasks, thus reducing network and server loading through task separation while creating a completely redundant system.
