Wonderware InTouch to Ignition Perspective Conversion
The City of Martinsburg, West Virginia was using a legacy Wonderware InTouch SCADA system developed in the early 2000s at their water treatment facility.
Aging hardware has an increased risk of system outages—and an ever-present threat of cyber security attacks to critical infrastructure. Martinsburg also needed more operator flexibility for managing the system. So, they decided to migrate their system to the Ignition SCADA platform by Inductive Automation.
The City of Martinsburg partnered with Corso Systems to take advantage of our Ignition Conversion Tool. We’ve designed it to quickly and accurately migrate legacy systems like Wonderware’s InTouch Platform to Ignition.
We also added functionality to our conversion tool to organize the flat tag structure from Wonderware InTouch, so that it creates an easy to navigate hierarchy in Ignition with folders and UDTs.
Solution
Corso Systems Ignition Conversion Tool with AI Powered Tag Engine
Wonderware InTouch Legacy SCADA System
Allen Bradley PLCs
Implementation Summary
After the City of Martinsburg provided Corso Systems with a backup of their Wonderware InTouch application, we processed the system with our Ignition Conversion Tool. This allowed us to convert all of the screens, tags, alarms, scripts, existing tag history, and project resources into Ignition Perspective.
Where possible, we also automatically generated templates in Perspective to save on over all maintenance requirements for any future development on the system. This approach gave us a fully functional Ignition Perspective application we could deploy for testing and validation.
All of the screens were fully functional and only required minor text changes where legacy fonts needed adjustment in the modern Ignition platform. All of the tag bindings were mapped correctly, and required only minimal data validation.
Before deploying the system into production, we decided that the existing tag structure needed to be updated a little more. The InTouch tag structure is a flat list of tags, so searching for a particular tag means that you need to scroll through an alphabetical list of every tag. Fortunately, Ignition is designed to use folders and UDTs to manage tags, which makes the process of drilling down to a particular data point much easier than in a flat structure.
We worked with the city’s operators to determine the correct naming convention for all of the various facilities, and developed an AI-powered tool to correlate and organize the tag structure from Wonderware into a much more user-friendly format in Ignition. This gave the operators human readable tag paths for every data point in the system.
Once the tag structure was updated, we re-ran our conversion tool to map everything to the new structure. We imported the historical data from the InTouch system, deployed the application to production, and then validated that everything worked as expected.
Results
We successfully converted the City of Martinsburg’s system from a legacy Wonderware InTouch application to Ignition’s Perspective system in a matter of days. The typical manual conversion methods would have taken many weeks or months.
The Corso Systems Ignition Conversion Tool simplified data validation and made it easy to apply things like the updated tag structure to the entire system at the click of a button.
The conversion tool has been put into use on many other projects on many other platforms, including some upcoming conversions from other legacy SCADA platforms for the City of Martinsburg after they saw the capabilities of the system and the Corso Systems team on their first conversion.
