The Perm-city based (Russia)"Oil Electronic Company" (OEC), was founded in 1995. In 2004, OEC engineers passed a SCADA/HMI TRACE MODE training at AdAstrA Research Group's training centre. Using this new knowledge, in the end of the year, the team has launched their first project: the remote control system for central heating using GSM-network as the basic data transmission media.

The distributed system covers 5 central heating plants in one city district that communicate their data to a remote operator. The central heating plants are connected with a dispatch via GSM-network.

The GSM remote system enables:

automatic control of the central heating process;
acquisition of process status, as well as heat and power consumption information;
communicating the collected information from central heating plants to the central dispatch;
human-machine interface;
remote manual central heating plant control;
central heating station process history logging;
process documentation.

Each central heating plant has a PC-based PAC controller with GSM-modem run under Micro TRACE MODE GSM+.

The controllers with Micro TRACE MODE GSM+ inside can operate in stand alone mode providing the following functions:

data acquisition from the sensors;
control shutter position;
control of pumps operation;
generate the reports for operator ;
transfer the data using GSM network;
executes operator's commands in a manual mode.

At the central operator hall the dedicated remote control server is installed run under SCADA TRACE MODE Real-Time Monitor GSM Activator . The Real Time Monitor acquires data from all five central heating plants. The overall polling cycle for this telemetry SCADA system is 10 minutes.

In addition to RTM and GSM Activator, the remote control server has a local SCADA TRACE MODE Documentation Server designed to generate and print the process reports.
Via Ethernet the telemetry server is connected to the additional operator's workstation (the graphical console). The operator has no physical access to the telemetry SCADA server, which increases the overall system reliability.

TRACE MODE Web Activator provides three extra SCADA workplaces in Intranet.

By adopting the new GSM-based telemetry system, operators were enabled to monitor the remote heating plants in real-time on SCADA PCs, log the process history, react speedily to alarms and print out the operation reports.