Ignition Aids Large-Scale Agriculture Project’s Goal To Reclaim One Million Acres

Project Summary:

Madkour Group needed to achieve Digital Transformation on the project infrastructure and automation system for the National Project for Developing the New Valley in Toshka. The project aims to reclaim one million acres outside of Cairo as part of Egypt’s overall plan to reclaim and cultivate three million acres in total. Leveraging Ignition’s scalable architecture, unlimited licensing, flexibility, and rapid development tools, Madkour established a central control building to easily operate, manage, and maintain a large number of sites, equipment, and facilities spread out across this vast desert area.

Problem:

The area that Madkour is cultivating — part of the South Valley Development, a vast area in southern Egypt, approximately 1,200 kilometers away from Cairo — was originally barren, with no soil, people, or water. Due to this distance, Madkour faced difficulties transporting materials and equipment to the site and eventually established facilities to produce brick, steel, and concrete locally. The logistics of the construction were substantial: Madkour excavated over 3.2 million cubic meters of rock, poured more than 252,000 cubic meters of concrete, and incorporated an extensive quantity of steel structures, totaling more than 1,852 tons.

Originally, the pump stations were operated manually, and with each station an hour apart, this setup was not feasible given the massive size of the project. This led to the idea of creating a control center to manage the entire area of Toshka. To accomplish this, Madkour needed a platform with no limitations that would allow them to begin from a small scale during the first phase, then expand to a larger scope in the subsequent phases, and ultimately encompass the entire project.

Madkour’s challenge was to build this scalable, customizable, and reliable central system that could comply with the Toshka project’s unusual requirements and large scale, all in a relatively short period of time.

Solution:

Madkour ended up choosing Ignition for its scalable architecture, unlimited licensing, flexibility, and rapid development tools. The Toshka control center is designed to monitor and control all elements of the irrigation system, which include more than 200 irrigation pump stations, five main lifting stations, 20 electrical MVSG, LV transformers and electrical panels, and more than 2,000 pivots. Using Perspective’s web-based UI flexibility, Madkour built dynamic templates backed by hierarchically structured UDTs. This iterative approach allowed them to deliver a scalable system in a short time.

Results:

The system now gathers real-time data from remote locations and provides the operations team with the reporting and analytic tools for making data-driven decisions.

Each pumping station can operate automatically as it pumps water into the main canal to supply the substations and agricultural areas in Toshka. If any issues arise, operators can react quickly and efficiently, accessing the Ignition system remotely from any mobile device. The system records events and alarms and stores them historically. The operator can display them either in real time or as analytical data to help with corrective actions.

Additionally, operators can easily monitor all the aspects of the station like production rates, electricity and water consumption, cost per cubic meter of water, as well as compare the performance of equipment, and make predictions based on historical data by combining data from the historian with real-time data.

The Ignition system interacts with the electrical signals and measurements of each station. This interaction extends to medium-voltage distributors and transformers, along with various vital signals and readings of the project.

Madkour’s development group has grown from one person at the beginning of the project to a team of ten. Over 4,000 workers were involved in Toshka across all companies, including other organizations working alongside Madkour.

Ignition reduced the costs overall, particularly in manpower. Madkour started the project with four operators working at a single station, and now, one operator can manage 10 stations.

By the end of 2024, Madkour will have reached a total of 167 irrigation stations, 1,811 pivots, and five water-pumping stations over an area of 200,000 acres. Madkour aims to reach 300 irrigation stations and over 3,400 pivots in the next two years with a total cultivated area of approximately 600,000 acres of the Toshka project’s goal of one million acres.

Start Date: August 2021

Deploy Date: March 2022