Trinity House Case Study

General Lighthouse Authority upgrades systems with Cogent Automation.

Working with Trinity House, the General Lighthouse Authority for England, Wales, the Channel Islands and Gibraltar, our engineers were integrated into their project delivery team to assist with coding, testing and deploying modifications to their first generation of distributed PLC controlled systems, which also involved a period living on station at an offshore site.

Following this success, we were requested to develop and evaluate a new hardware architecture for their second generation systems, consisting of redundant PLC and fieldbus networks.

After successfully demonstrating the new platform, we were awarded the contract to write a flexible PLC and HMI software solution. A principle requirement for the delivered system was to provide very high levels of modular configurability via engineering pages on the HMIs. The aim of this customer-led approach was to maintain a single off-the-shelf master copy of lighthouse software capable of rapid customisation for individual stations to cater for variations in installed hardware. One of the challenges was the development of communication interfaces for the control and monitoring of a number of proprietary hardware devices and telemetry systems.

The system is now being deployed in their program of station upgrades, with Cogent Automation developing and testing new features and interface modules as legacy station hardware is also upgraded to modern specifications.