Program 2022
Day 1: Thursday 24th November, 2022
Welcome from the Chair
Andrew West, Regional Technical Director, SUBNET Solutions
Digital strategy & capability
9:10 am
Delivering essential services to regional and remote communities
- Power, Gas, Water & Sewerage: 3 regulated networks, 150+ Isolated SCADA Systems, Multiple generational mixes
- Extreme Environmental Conditions: Cyclones, Storms, Temperature, Dust, Wildlife
- Enlisting & Training Communities to maintain service: Community access can often be inaccessible for weeks / months
- Graphical interface and data visualisation to overcome literacy, language and educational constraints
Kieran Magann, Senior SCADA & Control Systems Engineer, Power and Water Corporation
9:50 am
Transforming industrial automation strategies in the new digital SCADA economy
Brad Yager, Segment Lead Water & Wastewater and Consumer Packaged Goods, Schneider Electric
10:30 am
Morning tea and networking session
11:00 am
Network virtualisation and simulation – Redesigning 19th century power networks for 21st century operation
- Reimagining the design, management, and operation of electricity networks
- Transitioning to greener, energy-efficient and sustainable networks – Key drivers of electricity network destabilisation
- Meeting increased demand for connectivity, an explosion of electricity traffic volumes and two-way power operations
- Transform the network in order to support decarbonisation – Increasing volumes of clean energy
Steve Heinen, Future Network and Planning Manager, Vector Limited
11:40 am
Building the utility of the future: Successful strategies to leverage industrial IoT for smart communities, grid modernization, and more
Dr Christoph Prackwieser, IoT Manager, Operational Technology, Digital, Sydney Water
12:10 pm
An introduction to WSAA IoT Guidelines 2022
- An Industry Guideline to Leading Practice in IoT
- Supported by reference standards – Use cases and examples
- Practical Framework for Use by IoT Practitioners
- Vendor agnostic and applicable to small councils as well as large utilities
Mike Wassell, Managing Director, Operational Technology Services & IoT Specialist, Nucleus3 plus Acting Chair of the IoT Guidelines WSAA Steering Committee
Jim Baker, Senior Principal – OT Standards, Operational Technology, Water Corporation & IoT Guidelines WSAA Steering Committee
12:50 pm
Why a dedicated OT-SOC is vital to any industrial organisations cyber security gameplan
- Breaches in security of OT continue to increase
- Why OT environment needs 24/7 monitoring to detect and respond to cyber threats
- Why an IT-SOC won’t cut it
- What are the key options for industrial organisations- On Premise or Off-Premise Pros and Cons
- Why people are the key ingredient for OT-SOC success
- Lessons learnt from OT-SOC implementation
Dr Christopher Beggs, Founder & Principal ICS Security Consultant, SIS Industrial Cyber Security
1:20 pm
Lunch and networking break
2:20 pm
PANEL: Implementing new technologies, systems and processes
- Continuous trialling of new technologies – Evolving to a progressive improvement process
- Groups affected by innovation, internal and external – Creating a framework to guide decisions and how to collate
- What information is important —Who has it?, Who needs it?
- Coordination, iterations and implementation – A single point of control
James Cole, Secondary System Manager, Evoenergy
Dr Christoph Prackwieser, IoT Manager, Operational Technology, Digital, Sydney Water
Ben Armstrong, Development Engineer, Secondary Systems, Endeavour Energy
3:10 pm
Afternoon tea and networking session
3:50 pm
Config Management for secondary systems – Cloud deployment of OT support systems
- Evoenergy embarked on a path of IT/OT rationalisation, harmonising applications that interact with its operational network
- A new system has been implemented that provides device configuration management and cybersecurity management, integrating with existing works management systems
- Field device remote access and auditing enhances team efficiency and system reliability
James Cole, Secondary System Manager, Evoenergy
4:30 pm
Totem – A non SCADA SCADA system
- A hub to coalesce and process SCADA data
- Capture data vis direct device / system connectivity and wide protocol support
- Process data to produce information and reduce network costs
- Real time capacity monitoring – Focus on identifying constraints, maximising utilisation and making informed augmentation decisions
Timothy Lewsey, Manager Intelligent Grid Enablement, Energy Queensland
5:10 pm
Close of conference and networking drinks
7:15 pm
Official Conference Dinner @ Fox Classic Car Museum
Day 2: Friday 25th November, 2022
9:00 am
Welcome from the Chair
Andrew West, Regional Technical Director, SUBNET Solutions
9:10 am
Covid, WFH, BYOD, social distancing and isolation – A hacker’s eden
Nick Tamblyn, Assistant Director-General, Critical Infrastructure and Technology Branch, Cyber Security Services Division, Australian Signals Directorate
9:50 am
Cybersecurity Global Trends and Considerations for SCADA Systems
Ray Lock, Global Remote Access Solution Architect, Westermo
10:30 am
Morning tea and networking session
11:00 am
Effective alarm management to improve SCADA operations
- Areas of improvement: improve critical alarm handling, reduce nuisance alarms, deliver consistency in alarm configurations
- Current industry best practice: Adoption of IEC62682 lifecycle for each introduced alarm into the SCADA environment
- Developing smart alarm prioritization: Alarms to be prioritised based on the severity of the consequence, time required to respond, safety and operational criticality
- Configuring alarm severity colour coding: Review the current colour coding regarding alarm severity and the decision process to be completed in line with IEC62682
- Implementing alarm suppression: No specific alarm suppression being implemented at current stage, this initially could be simple case including ‘loss of indication power’.
Bozidar Mageroski, Electrical SCADA System Engineer, Operational Technology, Network Maintenance, Engineering and Maintenance, Sydney Trains
11:40 pm
Alarm Rationalisation – Smart alarm management to simplify operator workflows, improve decision accuracy, outcomes and response times
- The Issues:
- Information overload for operators possibly resulting in longer response time to outages
- Unknown appropriateness of the alarm settings and information
- No ability to audit and rationalise alarms
- No setpoints change approval process and tracking for compliance
- The Journey:
- Mapping out the journey given the objectives, budget, resource availability, timeframe
- Getting Started: Choosing the first steps
- Benchmarking using industry standards and measures and KPI targets
- Developing a cental setpoint management system for compliance parameters
- Implementing a continuous improvement lifecycle, including analysis tools, working groups across multidisciplinary stakeholders. Contributing to ongoing procedures, philosophies and standard updates
- Future steps – Dynamic alarm management to further improve situational awareness for the operator
Richard Behan-Howell, Principal Digital Engineer, Customer Delivery, Unitywater
12:20 pm
PANEL: Fire, flood, earthquake, pandemic – Building resilience to natural and created disasters
- Catastrophes are happening at ever greater rates – What is required to strengthen SCADA operations?
Kieran Magann, Senior SCADA & Control Systems Engineer, Power and Water Corporation
William Brennan, Acting Team Lead SCADA Applications Support, SA Water
1:20 pm
Lunch and networking session
2:20 am
Operations in Isolation: Dealing with Covid-19 while keeping the water running
This presentation will discuss how the Operations team at SA Water handled Covid-19 measures to ensure the critical workers could remain effective with the ever changing rules coming from the government, the company and the recommended health guidelines.
William Brennan, Acting Team Lead SCADA Applications Support, SA Water
3:00 pm
Afternoon tea and networking session
3:40 pm
Recruiting the next generation of talent – How to fill the skills gap
- My journey, history, experiences – What led me to SCADA as a career
- Positioning SCADA as a career for future engineers –
- Positioning SCADA to attract the best talent
- Leveraging programming experience and po
- Expanding the breadth and knowledge of candidates via training & education
Michael Logan, OT/SCADA Technical Specialist, Powercor
4:20 pm
Leveraging strategic telemetry data for improved delivery of services
- Utilising historical data to benchmark performance
- Comparing current observed data to historical performance and detect anomalies
- Variation outside a predetermined threshold is used to determine whether or not it is warranted to undertake a field investigation
- Limitations of the current implementation
- Next steps: Real time implementation and integration to other business systems (e.g. alarm management or Work Orders)
Mirek Januszek, Control Systems Manager, Sydney Water