The “Tunnel in Łódź” project

The Movicon11 system by Progea, installed by AB-MICRO in a tunnel in Łódź, won an award in the “Automazione Industriale Award 2016” competition organized in Italy by “Automazione Industriale” – a division of the “Tecniche Nuove” magazine.

The “Tunnel in Łódź” project, made at the end of 2015, was submitted to the competition by PROGEA, the manufacturer of MOVICON software, of which AB-MICRO is the General Distributor in Poland. The project beat the competition in the non-industrial automation category. The SCADA application based on the Movicon environment is one of the elements of the road tunnel supervision and control system built in the center of Łódź.

The competition committee appreciated the high level of integration with the directional traffic in the tunnel, the increased safety rates on the road, and the automation of each element of the system.

The awards ceremony was held on November 29, 2016, at the Accademy Tecniche Nuove in Milan during the Convention “Safety and security in automated systems”. The award was collected by Costantino Guarda, Sales Manager at Progea. (in the photo on the left)

Sprint company entrusted AB-MICRO with the task of implementing the master system for the tunnel in Łódź. The tunnel, located in the city center, consists of two aisles – north and south. The fully covered length is 250 m. The length of the entire road section under the supervision of the control system and SCADA is 2.5 km.

The tunnel uses two fiber optic rings – one for data transmission from cameras, the other for communication with the PLC controller – peripheral devices.

In the tunnel itself, there are:

  • 57 AID system cameras,
  • 11 sets of LCS and VMS variable message signs,
  • Philips autonomous lighting system, from which data is transferred to the control and SCADA system,
  • autonomous ventilation and fire protection system integrated with the control system and SCADA using electrical signals.

The tunnel was put into operation on October 31, 2015. It achieved full functionality on January 31, 2016.

AB-MICRO has fully performed its tasks, thanks to which the tunnel in Łódź controlled by the Movicon SCADA system obtained the following functions:

  • Monitoring of events on individual road sections
  • Reporting of alarm events that require confirmation by the operator
  • Logging of the history of events and alarms
  • Automatic traffic control using variable message signs according to defined scenarios (in situations posing a threat to road traffic, e.g. a stopped vehicle, pedestrian on the road, abandoned object)
  • Supervision of road traffic by many operators at the same time thanks to the client-server architecture of the SCADA system, allowing the connection of many operator terminals to the system
  • Manual control of road sections from the operator station, allowing, for example, to close a road section, close a traffic lane, or free passage of vehicles for each line of a road tunnel independently
  • Automatic fire detection based on the occurrence of 2 out of 3 events: reduced air transparency, pressing the MCP button, switching on the tunnel smoke exhaust
  • Manual activation of ventilation of the selected tunnel thread
  • Diagnostics of the condition of road traffic control devices and supervisory control system, among others variable message signs, central controller status, SCADA server operating status, UPS and emergency lighting

Redundancy of critical system components

  • Industrial communication network in the fail-safe topology of the segment of fiber optic ring networks with active devices by Hirschmann
  • Simatic S7-412H dual industrial controller from Siemens, operating in the hot reserve system
  • Double server with Progea SCADA Movicon 11 software working in the hot reserve system (over 3000 process and internal variables)
  • Automatic switch to spare in case of failure of the primary element