GEMA (Turkish Water Treatment Plant)

GEMA, a Turkish water treatment operator, faced a critical infrastructure decision when its primary control system reached the end of a 25-year service life. In the Energy & Utilities sector, aging control infrastructure creates compounding operational risks — from unavailable spare parts and eroded vendor support to unpatched cybersecurity vulnerabilities that modern threat actors actively exploit. For a municipal water treatment facility, control system failures carry public health consequences beyond typical industrial downtime. The legacy platform also lacked the data connectivity required to adopt energy efficiency programs, predictive maintenance, or advanced process optimization — leaving GEMA unable to improve chemical dosing, pump scheduling, or treatment cycle performance without first replacing the foundational control layer.

Rockwell Automation implemented its PlantPAx Distributed Control System (DCS) to replace GEMA's end-of-life legacy platform. PlantPAx provides a modern process control architecture built on Allen-Bradley ControlLogix controllers and FactoryTalk software, unifying process control, HMI visualization, and historian functions within a single integrated platform. The migration involved replacing aging control hardware and rebuilding process logic using PlantPAx's library-based engineering methodology, which standardizes reusable function blocks for common water treatment unit operations — including filtration, chemical dosing, and pump control. This structured library approach compresses engineering and commissioning timelines compared to fully custom implementations. The resulting DCS architecture established a connected data layer across the facility, creating the foundation for future integration of advanced analytics and optimization applications.

GEMA successfully decommissioned a 25-year-old control system that had exceeded its viable service life, eliminating operational risk from spare parts obsolescence and unsupported firmware. The transition to PlantPAx delivered:

• Enhanced process visibility: Unified HMI and historian access replaced fragmented legacy interfaces, giving operators a consolidated view of plant operations
• Improved cybersecurity posture: Modern network-segmented architecture replaced an unpatched legacy system carrying known vulnerability exposure
• Operational continuity: Migration completed at an active water treatment facility without extended treatment outages
• Future readiness: The new platform captures structured process data that enables analytics and optimization initiatives the prior system could not support

• Control systems in water treatment that reach 25 years typically combine three compounding risks simultaneously: unavailable spare parts, eroded operator institutional knowledge, and cybersecurity exposure — no individual mitigation resolves all three without full replacement.
• PlantPAx's library-based migration approach reduces custom engineering effort by reusing standardized function blocks for common water treatment processes, making it a practical choice for aging municipal infrastructure upgrades.
• Migrating a live treatment facility requires sequenced cutover planning to maintain regulatory compliance and treatment continuity throughout the transition.
• Modern DCS implementations create the historian and connectivity foundation that future AI-driven process optimization requires — aging SCADA systems cannot serve as that base layer.