Nationwide Ignition Platform Provides Centralized Supervision For Water Provider’s 10 Autonomous Regional Divisions

Project Overview

Veolia has partnered with 2Gi Technologie to modernize and expand its SCADA systems, covering both drinking water distribution and wastewater treatment operations. The project is built on a nationwide Ignition platform, deployed in a scalable, cloud-based architecture that ensures flexibility and future-proofing.

The new platform provides centralized supervision for Veolia’s 10 autonomous regional divisions, aggregating data from over 60,000 connected devices operating with a wide range of communication protocols.

This unified approach strengthens operational efficiency, improves responsiveness, and enhances data-driven decision-making to better protect and preserve water resources across critical infrastructure in alignment with Veolia’s “GreenUp” sustainability initiative.

Challenges

Veolia was operating with an aging SCADA system that struggled to keep pace with modern operational demands. The legacy infrastructure lacked compatibility with new communication protocols, limiting integration with new field equipment. Scalability was also a major concern, with over 105 independent servers deployed across the country, creating a complex, costly, and difficult-to-maintain environment. Additionally, the existing system offered no built-in tools for creating synoptics, preventing teams from developing real-time graphical representations of operations essential for efficient monitoring and decision-making.

The project presented several significant challenges that required careful planning and execution. One of the key difficulties was transitioning the entire infrastructure to AWS, ensuring a smooth migration to the cloud while maintaining operational continuity. Another major challenge was reducing the number of servers from 105 to just 30, which involved consolidating and rationalizing the existing infrastructure. This effort was paired with the need to centralize backend operations with a redundant architecture per region, ensuring both efficiency and reliability. Handling the historical data from vast volumes of operational records also posed a technical hurdle, requiring effective data migration strategies. Finally, the project aimed to create a single, unified repository for industrial IT (OT) systems, consolidating disparate systems, and establishing a cohesive and future-proof framework for operations across the entire network.

Solution

To address these challenges, the project leveraged Ignition's scale-out architecture, enabling a flexible and scalable platform for remote monitoring and control. The deployment also utilized the Enterprise Administration Module (EAM), optimizing system integration and management across Veolia’s network. 2Gi Technologie developed custom domain-specific objects for water and wastewater operations, tailored to the unique needs of the infrastructure. 2Gi Technologie also implemented an auto-learning intelligence function to facilitate device self-discovery and enable dynamic mapping between automation variables and business objects, streamlining configuration and operational efficiency. Additionally, 2Gi Technologie created dynamic Ignition dashboards, using historical data exploration to automatically generate visualizations, ensuring real-time insights into performance and system health.

The solution featured a technical architecture with a high level of complexity, consisting of:

• Full AWS with two load-balanced frontends (serverless, using leased licensing), 10 redundant Ignition gateways for the backends, and one EAM.
• Performance tuning using remote tag provider.
• Performance tuning to import huge historical volumes via store and forward.
• Connection to 105 legacy SCADA systems (approximately 10 per region) with both API and OPC UA connection.
• Connection to a communication frontend for proprietary protocols with centralized administration of the devices (via API).

Result

The project delivered significant benefits, transforming the way Veolia manages its operations. One of the key results was contextualizing Veolia’s business data, providing a seamless, user-friendly experience for end users without disrupting daily operations. The Ignition system ensured real-time visibility and proactive management through map automated generation, complete with alarms and customized dashboards for each installation. Standardized KPI visualization across all autonomous regions of France enabled consistent performance tracking and decision-making. The solution also allowed Veolia to create custom synoptics tailored to specific needs, leveraging business objects mapped through auto-discovery for efficient reuse. Scalability became a core strength of the new infrastructure, ensuring the system can grow with future demand. Finally, the project enabled the provision of qualified and contextualized data, which seamlessly integrated with other business applications, enhancing overall operational intelligence.

Project Team

Integrator Team:

The 2Gi Technologie team consists of four highly skilled professionals, all certified as Ignition Gold experts. They were responsible for the design, configuration, and implementation of the Ignition platform, ensuring its seamless integration into Veolia's infrastructure.

Client Team:

On Veolia’s side, the team was composed of four key individuals, including a Product Manager, an AWS Infrastructure Team, a Project Director, and a PMO (Project Management Office). This diverse team worked closely with 2Gi Technologie to ensure that the project met business requirements, stayed on track, and aligned with Veolia’s strategic goals for the Digital Transformation of its water and wastewater operations.

Start Date: November 2023

Deploy Date: June 2025