An integrated cctv system | Security Buyer

An integrated CCTV system tough enough to survive the demands of heavy industry John Adams from Security Electronics and Networks Magazine takes a look at BlueScope Steel’s Port Kembla Steelworks in Australia where the company’s in-house contracting division has integrated Controlware’s Cware Prime video management system into an existing hybrid surveillance solution which comprises analogue and megapixel cameras, as well as network storage and multiple remote workstations.

BlueScope Steel’s Port Kembla Steelworks is a massive industrial facility covering 800 hectares just south of the fast-growing City of Wollongong. BlueScope Steel Limited was formed as a company after being spun out from BHP Billiton Ltd in 2002, originally trading as BHP Steel before being renamed as BlueScope Steel Limited in 2003. The Port Kembla Steelworks is a vital component of BlueScope Steel and its largest complex, and the safety and security of this site are paramount.

When you arrive at Port Kembla Steelworks, what strikes you first is the size of the place. At 12km long, this site is truly vast – physically it’s the largest electronic security site I’ve seen in more than 20 years. The invitation from BlueScope Steel to meet had included a Google Earth Map attachment and on arrival I found the satellite map was necessary. There would be no walking around this site – it was a car tour.

The other thing that’s immediately apparent when you arrive at Port Kembla Steelworks is that this is a serious industrial facility and it comes with all the challenges you’d expect to find. There’s dust, there’s molten metal spatter, there’s intense heat, there’s heavy transport moving around – trucks and trains - and there are massive power local sources. There are also mountainous steel structures dotted across the landscape and that means use of wireless to handle video communications, as you typically might on a site this size, is impossible.

Not surprisingly, there’s significant legacy infrastructure that the technical team needed to leverage in order to give the best possible performance without losing sight of economy. Something else that’s important about this system is that while the surveillance installation has a security component, a great part is dedicated to process control and OH&S. Camera views are used by control room teams managing the site’s steel-making plants to ensure safe and efficient operation.

“The system is a work in progress and there are multiple interested parties needing access to cameras. Obviously this has an impact on the way the system evolves” The integrator and system designer at Port Kembla Steelworks is BlueScope’s in-house contractor – Communications Technologies & Maintenance, which is itself part of Bluescope’s Electrical Services Department. As BlueScope’s technical officer Martin King explains, BlueScope was also the system designer at Port Kembla Steelworks.

“Our department was the integrator from the point of view of BlueScope Steel,” explains King. “The way we work is that all the different parts of the plant are Communications Technologies & Maintenance customers and we support them all. We can handle smaller tasks ourselves and in this case we worked with BlueScope Information Systems department and oversaw contractors throughout the system setup.”

According to King, the surveillance system is continually evolving with the ultimate goal being that authorised users will be able to look at any of the 500 cameras on the site that are assigned to them, whether these are legacy analogue cameras, IP cameras, or megapixel.

“The system is a work in progress and there are multiple interested parties needing access to cameras. Obviously this has an impact on the way the system evolves.” King explains. “There are also technical considerations to take into account.

“For example, we have a manager in the Basic-Oxygen Steelmaking (BOS) area who wants more cameras in a particular location and we’re waiting to see whether senior management decides to invest further in the IP elements of the solution before we decide how our plans develop.”

“There are obviously economies of scale when the infrastructure is in place but the network investment is significant compared to analogue. It’s obviously a lot more flexible when you can install a camera, and plug it into the network without having to run dedicate cables but there is a trade-off in terms of cost and convenience.”

“We also have a video feed that crosses the site that is being used to view machinery and plant operations up at the Spring Hill Works, which does cold rolling, painting and finishing. It allows remote maintenance management as well.”

System layout

At the heart of the BlueScope surveillance system is a site-wide network of fibre optic cable. King explains that BlueScope’s use of fibre is based on the challenges of moving video signals around on a site that uses large amounts of electrical power and generates significant local EMI.

“We’ve thought about wireless links but we’ve gone with fibre optic cable because we think it will be more reliable on a site like this with a lot of metal structures, heavy transport and electrical fields,” King says. “Fibre insulates us from the large voltage fluctuations across the site.”

“A fibre backbone was rolled out across the Port Kembla Steelworks many years ago and there are spare cores in that backbone,” King explains. “We have used those cores where we can and in other places we have installed dedicated fibre links to support the surveillance system.

“Importantly, there has been an upgrade going on of the network around the site which will give BlueScope a new 10GB backbone,” he says. “The surveillance system is separate to that new backbone but there are crossovers in certain areas with part of the system able to be accessed from the production network.”

According to King, most cameras on the site are legacy analogue and many are high-end Panasonic but he says IP cameras have now been installed as well.

“When the system first began to go hybrid, our BlueScope customers realised they could use the surveillance system to give other people access to camera views and we started thinking about the ease of installing IP cameras in order to upgrade the system.

“As a result we now have some Bosch IP cameras and a few megapixel cameras for specific process control applications. King says that to bring analogue signals onto the network BlueScope uses Bosch VideoJet VJ8008 8-channel encoders, as well as VIP X1s and X2s MPEG-4 encoders.

“Which path we choose onto the network depends if it’s an existing installation or a new IP camera,” says King. “We have racks in a cubicle for our analogue signals to come back to - we pick the analogue signals up in the racks and get them onto the network that way.”

“We have 123 CCTV cameras in our own area at present - there will be 130 as we are still expanding the system but works-wide there are more than 400 cameras looking at process and then there are the security cameras on top of that – that’s another 100 cameras.”

BlueScope’s Paul Risku says while the integrators mainly tried to use fibre, in some cases they also used DSL modems on phone cable to convert signals to Ethernet to bring the signals back to a central location using existing 2-pair copper infrastructure.

“Where we have used fibre, the way the system design works is that we take fibre to an enclosure as close as we can to the cameras and then run a coax drop cable from the closet to the camera in the field,” he says.

According to Risku the system incorporates dedicated recording servers with recording rates ranging from 1 frame a second to 25 frames a second, depending on what’s being viewed.

“There are servers located in network areas in the Hot Core Processing Department (HCPD), as well as in the Coupled Pickle Cold Mill,” Risku explains. “The CPCM is the largest area in terms of the video surveillance system. We have 4 VJ8008s down there with 23 inputs spread across those and with more VJ8008 units going in.

“Cware is a perfect networked solution for BlueScope. There’s a client server, there are workstations on different parts of the LAN, everything streams and records to servers and the various teams use their workstations to look at their own local cameras.”

“All in all, there are currently 7 servers in the network,” Risku says. “And as the system evolves we’ll also have storage capability in production areas so if we were to lose a network link to our main database server in our system area footage will keep streaming to the local server so the problem won’t affect steel production.”

Risku says that in terms of network design there is a crossover to the main computer network at the BOS with the network traffic is kept as local as possible to reduce load on the servers. The main control hub for the BOS is in a central location near No.5 Blast Furnace and there’s also a storage server there for cameras in the BOS area.

The BOS installation, which is one of a number of primary nodes networked across the site, is well organised with hardware installed in 19-inch racks with the incoming analogue feeds going to the VIP and VJ8008 encoders and then on to IP servers for network access and routing to RAID recording servers. Each rack of surveillance equipment is supported by a 6-battery UPS.

Controlware’s Cware Prime

It goes without saying that the driving force of the networked surveillance system at BlueScope’s Port Kembla Steelworks is Controlware’s Cware Prime Video Management and Recording Solution. The beauty of Cware Prime, according to Controlware Australia’s country manager, Claude Rizk, is its ability to handle management and control of live and recorded video in a hybrid networked environment.

Cware Prime offers BlueScope customisable management, display, alarm, recording and playback features in a flexible client-server architecture that allows unlimited cameras, servers and authorised workstations across LANs and WANs. It’s a functionality suite that’s perfect for BlueScope’s in-house integration team and IS department.

“In terms of system design, the guys here at BlueScope are trained on Cware and have written the macros and the layouts for integration with alarm systems. When an alarm comes in it accesses a camera and brings up a screen and the operator can bring up the scene, view the area and sound sirens to warn pedestrians,” Rizk explains.

Important for a site like this, Rizk says Cware Prime is an open system.
“It’s not dedicated to one encoder type, or camera type,” Rizk explains. “This means that in the future if some better device comes along BlueScope can use it - be that something H.264, MPEG4, MPEG2, HD, megapixel or whatever, Cware will support it.

“All the major brands are integrated into CWare and the BlueScope team in the future may like a particular new product or brand and won’t have to change the software in order to leverage the capability of the new device - they can just enable it and the device will work.”

According to Rizk, the BlueScope integration team benefits from their hands-on involvement with the software installation which he says allows them to guarantee successful commissioning.

“With Cware Prime there’s an SDK so you can have your access control integrate into the system at a high level with video surveillance,” Rizk says. “And there’s also low level integration with I/O units that integrate into the software. It’s a combination that gives BlueScope plenty of flexibility.”

Rizk says that for BlueScope it was a tough initial decision to go IP.

“The BlueScope team weren’t sure what the networked images would look like but when they saw a couple of sites with MPEG-2 compression they realised there was significant flexibility and a networked solution was not just viable but superior in many ways to analogue,” he says.

When it came to the management and recording system selection process, BlueScope’s Paul Risku says that before the installation started, BlueScope had been working towards a video surveillance standard for the whole plant.

“Our group, CTM Engineering and BlueScope’s Information Systems department all got together and conducted a product study and the result of our in-house study was that we chose the Cware video management and recording solution,” Risku says.

Meanwhile, King says the initial software system has constantly evolved since the initial installation. He explains that once Cware was installed BlueScope began to expand the overall system but he says broader plans were stalled as the GFC hit and it was more recently that expansion restarted.

“We’ve commenced work on the BOS with cameras being installed in No.5 Blast Furnace,” King says. “The network has been extended to the Sinter Plant area for process control monitoring down there.

That initial team effort did not end with selection of Cware Prime – various departments across BlueScope have contributed expertise to perfect the eminently customisable management Cware solution to the site’s specific needs.

“The Automation Engineering Group has been a great help,” says Paul Risku. “We had a need for some time-lapse recording on a couple of megapixel cameras and they were able to integrate that into the software package for us.

“The Automation Engineering Group also successfully interfaced the Cware software with BlueScope’s mill systems which is vital from the point of view of process monitoring.”

“Throughout the evolving installation process we’ve also worked with BlueScope’s IS department,” says Risku. “IS handles all the IT work on the site and we worked in with them when we introduced the Cware product. This was important because there are obviously issues like bandwidth and how it will affect the wider network, as well as network security issues.”

King agrees.

“Running video on the general data network is challenging and that’s why we’ve got the separate network set up to handle our video streams,” he says. “It’s a separate network with separate fibres, though as we’ve mentioned there are crossovers to other parts of the network.”

System monitoring and management

Most the cameras being viewed live are monitored for the HCPD. This includes the cameras monitored in the control room at No.5 Blast Furnace – that’s the control room we visit. It’s an excellent space for the task, with plenty of cameras giving good views of the furnace itself.

“The guys in the control room at No.5 Blast Furnace can monitor the furnace all the time, as well as when the furnace is being tapped,” King explains. “Cameras monitored here are used for process monitoring primarily.

“We placed 5 individual monitors including a larger LCD screen in the control room of Number 5 Blast Furnace and the big screen displays 9 images instead of the usual 4.”

Once we’ve had a good look at this area we head back to the BlueScope integration team’s office, which incorporates rack-space for management and storage of footage from the site’s security cameras. The area has workstations and equipment and doubles as a test area where staff can set up equipment before integrating it into the system. There’s also a management workstation here and a twenty minute demonstration shows just how easy the system is to action.

According to King, there are there are 6 areas in the system, with area 5 being the most recent one.

“We can create our own layouts for these areas using Cware in order to make overall system management easier,” King explains.

“And before we implement any new software into the wider system we load it into the standby system and this allows us to adjust or change things easily before the software gets implemented. That protects the system from commissioning failures that might impact on production.

“From our workstation here we can see all the image streams for the whole plant but each section on the site when they log in to their authorised workstations can only see the cameras in their own area unless they have been granted access to additional areas.”

Paul Risku says that the design of the system makes it possible for a section to monitor someone else’s process control cameras as well as their own, though they have their own servers.

“From an operational point of view the ability to see cameras from upstream and downstream makes the system much more capable by building in a level of monitoring redundancy in the unlikely event we have network issues or upgrades.”

Cware is also capable from a network management point of view. When a camera is added to the system, the BlueScope team can use C-ware to see the system load and distribute that load in the most efficient way.
“We can see the drive load and manage the 16 storage bays at the CPCM from here at our own management workstation, as well as handling the 7 bays down here in our own racks,” says King. “We can set camera settings, we can adjust storage settings. At the HCPD we’ve got 4 PTZ cameras and we can operate them from here.

“You can set different recording streams for different cameras,” King explains. “We have some that will record for 2 months before they begin to write over and some that are set for 91 days.”

Site challenges

This is a big and rugged site. Along with the network challenges already mentioned, the Port Kembla Steelworks would test the bravest camera and there’s no doubt which of the 2 contenders would win out.

“This is a tough environment for CCTV cameras, it’s industry, it’s dirty,” says King. “We need robust cameras that are reliable. We put cameras in dangerous areas where we don’t want people such as around the blast furnaces and that can be problematic because when the cameras need servicing someone has to get in there and repair or replace them.

“We have cameras above the coke making machine - this is a terrible environment for video surveillance equipment,” King says. “Cameras simply melt through the radiant heat - we once had a collection of Salvador Dali-ish cameras that had melted into strange shapes.

“If they don’t fail immediately cameras will often gradually deform and as they do the lens will move a bit and then a bit more and finally the camera will go out of focus and be completely useless.”
King gestures to a camera view on Cware’s monitoring screen.

“Those sparks you can see flying up in this area are caused by the metal being poured and spattering out,” he says. “See the grey areas in the image? That’s metal spatter baked onto the lens. We have cameras that over time get so spattered with cast iron and they get locked into place. They look like they are covered in thick dust but they are actually encased in a crust of metal. There’s no cleaning them or repairing them – they are ruined.

“We have cameras above the coke making machine - this is a terrible environment for video surveillance equipment. Cameras simply melt through the radiant heat - we once had a collection of Salvador Dali-ish cameras that had melted into strange shapes”

“Obviously, these cameras are vital and do a job people can’t do, which is watching hot metal being poured and moving through the mill. These capabilities are important because you can’t go into the area while they are actually pouring metal – the heat is fiercely intense. In areas like this we don’t clean the glass on the cameras; we replace it because of metal spatter.
“We also use chilled water-filled stainless steel jackets to cool cameras installed near furnaces. In the early days we designed our own but these days we buy them off-the-shelf.”

And if the heat is not enough of a problem, many installations are external or partly external and because Port Kembla Steelworks is adjacent to the ocean, King says most the camera housings will eventually just fall apart from corrosion.

Conclusion

According to Paul Risku, the surveillance system at BlueScope Steel is very much a work in progress and this constant evolution is easily supported by Cware Prime.

“Obviously different departments in BlueScope have different and changing requirements,” Risku says. “Now we have the main infrastructure in and have installed Cware we can just add to it - that is the beauty of this system - you can expand on it any way you like.

“From the point of view of the system upgrade here it involved setting up the system server and adding storage servers to that, interfacing cameras to encoders to the areas that need them, whether that involves interfacing existing cameras or adding new ones.

“Ultimately the decision to go with Cware has been excellent. The system is capable and if we did need something specific added, Controlware was able to incorporate that function into the system for us.”

Meanwhile King, who has worked at the Port Kembla site for than 30 years says the team have just completed a full Cware system upgrade and he says the Controlware solution is excellent, both stable and easy to work with. King’s enthusiasm for the site and the surveillance system are readily apparent.

“People don’t appreciate the scope of the site,” King says. “As well as its size, everything about this facility is on a grand scale. The huge cranes here are the largest in southern hemisphere.

“This is a huge operation and it’s still the heart and soul of the Illawarra region. Ensuring the safety, security and efficiency of the Port Kembla Steelworks is serious business.

“It’s a quantum leap for many people to think about going to a networked surveillance solution using Cware and IP or megapixel cameras. People are used to using the old analogue systems,” he explains. “But the world is moving on and you have to move with it.”

“People don’t appreciate the scope of the site. As well as its size, everything about this facility is on a grand scale. This is a huge operation and it’s still the heart and soul of the Illawarra region. Ensuring the safety, security and efficiency of the Port Kembla Steelworks is serious business”