The pioneers from Viborg Spildevand (Viborg Wastewater Treatment Plant) were the first to use the mouse for process supervision. Today, 23 years later, Viborg Spildevand is far from the only plant using IGSS. And the mouse seems to have caught on just fine since then.
In my perspective there are no limitations whatsoever in using IGSS. Whenever I asked if this or that would be possible, it always turned out to be easy to implement. The entire plant staff has been very excited about working with IGSS, and compared to other SCADA/HMI systems, that I know of, the learning curve is fairly smooth because working with the “mouse” makes the operation a simple task.
Those were the words of Operations Manager, Ejlif Mikkelsen, at Viborg Wastewater Treatment Plant, when he was interviewed for the Danish trade magazine Automatik in the autumn of 1987.
At that time the Bruunshåb wastewater treatment plant, as it was called back then, was the very first plant to install the IGSS SCADA system, and Automatik naturally wanted to be there and spread the word about ”the highly advanced and innovative Danish system that uses a standard PC as the graphical operator station and a mouse to navigate the system.”
A Prophecy Come True
”It is interesting to see how the program is fully established within the scope of GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) from one of the world’s largest software houses, Digital Research Inc., in the USA. This ensures IGSS a long lifespan in a market where things are happening really fast,” was the conclusion from the author of the article back in 1987 – and he was proven right.
Since 1986, IGSS has been sold to more than 28,000plants across the world, and the system is still among the most innovative in the market.
First with Objects
Jørgen Friis-Nielsen from Danish engineering company, COWI, was part of the team that developed the system and he also took active part in selling it to Viborg Municipality. He is not surprised by IGSS’ success: ”IGSS was revolutionary in several areas. The system aroused an enormous interest, when we presented it at a large scale EU conference in 1989. The system was the first mouse controlled supervisory system and the first truly object-oriented system.”
”The fact that a SCADA solution is object-oriented has a significant impact on the user-friendliness and system efficiency. It was only a few years ago that competitors produced their first object-oriented solutions,” says Jørgen Friis-Nielsen.
”When we developed the solution for Viborg we wanted a system with staggering 25 objects. The developer, Torkel Jensen, fought a brave battle and felt that 25 was really the limit for objects. So when we shortly after wanted to double the number he was dumbfounded.
He nevertheless developed an amazingly fast data collection engine with a special comma separated file. This was, and still is, one of the strengths in IGSS. Today, the system easily juggles several thousand objects,” Jørgen Friis-Nielsen concludes.