About Steria

Steria delivers IT enabled business services and is the trusted transformation partner for private and public sector organisations across the globe. By combining in depth understanding of our clients’ businesses with expertise in IT and business process outsourcing, we take on our clients’ challenges and develop innovative solutions to address them efficiently and profitably. Through our highly collaborative consulting style, we work with our clients to transform their business, enabling them to focus on what they do best.

Our 20,000 people, working across 16 countries, support the systems, services and processes that make today’s world turn, touching the lives of millions around the globe each day. Founded in 1969, Steria has offices in Europe, India, North Africa and SE Asia and a 2011 revenue of €1.75 billion. 21% of Steria’s capital is owned by its employees. Headquartered in Paris, Steria is listed on the Euronext Paris market.

Prosys as a Development Support Partner

Prosys is one of the few OPC UA JAVA SDK providers and offers a very suitable entry point to the OPC UA technology with their QuickStart Service. We have also appreciated Prosys licensing model. The excellent support of Prosys and the fast response time of their support team have positively confirmed our decision.

Traffic Management in Canton Valais Switzerland

Steria is the provider of the traffic management SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system for the whole canton Valais in Switzerland. The main task of this system includes the central monitoring and alerting in case of events in tunnels or sections of the highway network of the Valais region.

Steria’s traffic management system is a real time distributed Java based application. The communication between Steria’s traffic management application and underlying systems (ventilation, fire alarm system, lightning system, etc.) used to be implemented with a project specific text-based interface for all previously integrated tunnels. For the latest expansion of the traffic management’s perimeter (an additional tunnel and two galleries on the “Simplon Pass”) the Swiss Federal Road Agency has selected OPC UA as the new standard to be used.

The underlying systems notify their current status with event based methods to the SCADA system of Steria and also receive corresponding commands from the superordinate system. The OPC UA solution of Prosys has been used as a building block for this interface.

OPC UA Interface Experiences

The main advantage of using OPC UA is definitely that we are now using a well-established official interface specification instead of a project specific one.

During the implementation of the interface the limitations of the COTS OPC UA Servers for PLC Devices posed the biggest challenge. For example most of them do not support calling and executing methods, it was thus necessary to invest in creative workaround solutions that still guarantee secure and dependable operation. Our OPC UA interface has been running reliably in production since Fall of 2012.