WITS has been set up by water professionals to address the lack of inter-company cooperation and standardisation in the UK telemetry sector, particularly focussed on monitoring operational assets by telemetry systems. The initiative was established by individuals from a number of the Water Management Organisations (WMOs) in conjunction with consultants from Grontmij and Parsons Brinckerhoff, to provide greater flexibility in product selection and lower costs when replacing telemetry components.

The potential impact of WITS was highlighted in a recent UK water industry survey, which revealed that a significant number of telemetry systems, together with over 37,000 data loggers and 35,000 remote telemetry outstations require replacement during AMP5.

Until now, assets installed by one manufacturer needed to be replaced by the same manufacturer, tying WMOs to one company and causing issues when parts were discontinued. Since forming in 2005, the WITS management committee has been working to standardise the way remote telemetry outstations communicate with the main system. This involves producing application notes to specify the required functionality that work in conjunction with an international standard, Distributed Network Protocol (DNP3), so that manufacturers can create universal products for use on compliant telemetry systems.

Charles Williams, Grontmij UK’s strategic business director and one of the founding supporters of the WITS management committee, said: “We established WITS to both reduce costs to the WMOs and to open up the market for the suppliers. This has not been an easy task, with a great deal of effort being supplied by both the group of suppliers involved and the WMOs. We are now at the end of the journey, with the protocol standard and associated products about to be launched.

“We have established partnerships with five manufacturers to develop the standard and create the universal products, which are currently undergoing thorough testing and these will be unveiled and showcased for the water industry at the IET Water Conference.”

At the conference, the management committee will provide an update of the progress and latest programme for the launch of the WITS-DNP3 protocol standard, as well as a demonstration of interoperability between the WITS-DNP3 enabled prototypes."

The Committee will be releasing the application notes to the market in September 2009, which will enable other manufacturers to commence development of their master station products. This will be followed by a second release in April 2010 for field device product manufacturers. It is expected that this will create significant cost savings and provide greater choice and easier application for field device asset replacements.

Based on the DNP3 standards, WITS has been developed with leading professionals in telemetry and experts in DNP3, including a member of the international committee for the DNP3 Standard, Barry Shephard, principal engineer at Grontmij.

Mr Shephard commented: “Although there are various established standards in other countries, DNP3 was chosen as the most suitable to be utilised by WITS. This Standard suits the systems used in the UK and is a well-established, reliable model. We were able to identify how best to use the many features of DNP3 to meet the user requirements, identified during the early stages of the WITS’ development. The model is described in a series of application notes that were reviewed by the DNP3 technical committee to ensure conformance to the DNP3 Standard.”

The WITS-DNP3 protocol standard and the manufacturer products will be unveiled at the IET Water Conference on May 5th and 6th in Birmingham’s Aston Villa Park.