WITS stands for Water Industry Telemetry Standards and comprises a group of vendors and users who work together to specify standards within the Water Industry. The WITS group was formed over 13 years ago and their first protocol standard was WITS-DNP3 Protocol which as you can see from the map on this page, has a growing adoption. The members of WITS are collectively known as the WITS PSA (Protocol Standards association) and an elected set of members form the WITS PSAC (Protocol Standards Committee). Mark Davison of Terzo Digital has been elected onto the WITS PSAC multiple times and both Neil and Mark have a long history with WITS, stretching back to roles before Terzo.
Like many vendors who operate in the UK Water market, Pulsar were aware of the opportunities associated with implementing WITS-DNP3 on their devices. WITS-DNP3 is becoming the lingua franca for devices within the UK Water industry with users seeing cost reductions and competition in the devices they can deploy. There is also a benefit for vendors in that, by implementing WITS-DNP3 on their devices, they can interoperate with more UK Water company master stations. Pulsar took the decision to go ahead with implementing WITS-DNP3 as an extra protocol on their Ultimate Controller product, having already implemented DNP3.
Given our previous relationship with Pulsar and their knowledge that we were heavily involved with WITS, we started talking with Pulsar about helping them to put WITS-DNP3 onto the Ultimate and we started work with Pulsar in 2015 to achieve this.
We worked as part of the Pulsar development team to provide specific WITS knowledge, and assisted with the design and implementation of the WITS protocol code.
Dr Sang Tran, Technology Director at Pulsar Process Measurement Ltd said, “Terzo assisted in project management and integration of WITS to our DNP3 RTU, their role was the coding of aspects of WITS into our existing DNP3 RTU, and building of test harness for regression testing. They produced appropriate documentation, time scales and milestones from their work and managed a ticket system for ironing out any bugs in the development and deployment stage in a professional manner”.
The aims of the project were to get WITS Self-Certification and authentication with the Servelec ScopeX Master Station. Both aims were successfully achieved. In May 2017 Pulsar also attended the WITS Plugfest with the Ultimate and were able to prove interoperability with both the Schneider Electric ClearSCADA Master Station and the Servelec ScopeX Master Station.
Mark Davison, Terzo Digital, November 2017