Environment

Sewer Water Level Monitoring System

Taipei is located at the center of the Taipei Basin, fringed by Tamshui river, Hsintien River JingMei River, and traversed by JiLong River. In summer, the city is frequently hit by typhoons, which account for the most of Taipei”s annual rainfall. As a result, massive summer floods can easily victimize Taipei. To protect Taipei citizens, Taipei City Government has launched projects to monitor the sewer water level so that the early flood alert is made possible. While considering the data communication, it”s not efficient to build wire-line network due to poor quality control, high maintenance overhead and long lead time. Meanwhile, there has to be huge numbers of communication equipment at the central site due to one-to-one communication architecture for wire-line. Also, problems for traditional wireless solution like proprietary radio system and micro-wave are encountered as

regards to the application of operational license and huge network implementation cost. Other problems needed to be covered include the sensor connection, integration of solar power and battery, and analog/digial signal conversion. All and all will take tremendous engineering efforts to build up the total monitoring system.

GPRS is selected as the transmission media in this application for its merits: complete network coverage, no network license and construction charge, flexible billing, multi-port to single-port architecture and TCP/IPenabled potocol. In this application, MA8-2 is connected to the AD converter via the RS-485 port. The included Windows-based configuration tool provides all necessary settings on data protocol analysis and task management that no AT command programming is ever needed. After

pooling data out from each sensor at the remote sites, the collected data are then transmitted back to the GIS system in the management center via GPRS network and Internet. For a complex system like this, it takes only 2 weeks for the system integrator on the total system implementation. Tremendous savings on time and cost are thus achieved.