Customer: City of Huntington Beach, California Industry: Water, Wastewater & Municipal Operations SCADA: VTScada™ by Trihedral® Integrator: Enterprise Automation
About the City
Huntington Beach is a coastal city of more than 200,000 residents with critical infrastructure supporting water, wastewater, and municipal operations across a wide geographic area. Like many modern municipalities, the City relies on its SCADA system to maintain visibility and control over distributed assets that must operate reliably around the clock.
Overview
The City operates a large, distributed SCADA system responsible for collecting real-time data from remote infrastructure across the city. VTScada gathers and manages operational data from controllers spread across cellular, radio, and fiber links.
Maintaining reliable communication between those sites is critical for operational visibility — but testing changes safely before deployment was a major challenge.
The Challenge
Huntington Beach's SCADA network spans dozens of remote controllers connected through a mix of cellular, radio, and fiber infrastructure. The City's development environment could not fully replicate real-world communication conditions.
That created the risk most municipalities face every day:
- Changes tested in development could behave differently in production
- Communication failures could result in loss of visibility into city infrastructure
- Engineers spent significant time building workarounds and troubleshooting after deployment
Without a realistic testing environment, every update carried operational and financial risk.
The Solution
Working with its systems integrator, Enterprise Automation, the City deployed SimServe™ on its development platform.
SimServe simulates remote-site controller memory and communication pathways, letting VTScada poll simulated devices exactly as it would in production. Configured to emulate approximately 70 remote site controllers, SimServe transformed the development environment into a true representation of the production network.
Before SimServe
The development system mirrored production software but lacked realistic remote-site communication. Engineers could only connect a temporary controller for limited testing, leaving most communication paths unverified.
After SimServe
SimServe runs on a virtual machine inside the development environment and simulates every remote controller and communication path. Engineers now perform full end-to-end testing from VTScada to simulated PLCs before touching production. The result is faster testing, safer deployments, and greater confidence in every release.
This enabled the City to:
- Test SCADA updates under realistic conditions
- Validate communications before deployment
- Identify issues earlier in the development cycle
- Reduce the risk of outages or operational blind spots
"Before SimServe, we couldn't fully test how changes would behave across the network. Now we can validate communications in development and deploy with far more confidence."
— Stewart Griffin, Utilities Technology Supervisor, City of Huntington Beach
Operational Impact
SimServe doesn't just save time — it changes how deployments happen. Tasks that previously required manual setup, configuration changes, and post-deployment troubleshooting are now eliminated or dramatically reduced.
Per deployment:
- Frees engineering time to focus on higher-priority work
- Fewer communication surprises in production
- Faster validation cycles
- Reduced operational risk
With regular deployments throughout the year, SimServe lets the City move changes into production faster, with far less risk and far fewer engineering workarounds — turning deployments into a controlled process rather than a potential disruption.
Financial Impact
Without SimServe, replicating the production network in development would require purchasing physical hardware for every remote controller and communication pathway.
| Hardware | Estimated Cost |
|---|---|
| 70 Site Controllers | $700,000 |
| Modbus Gateways | $4,000 |
| Modems / Routers | $4,000 |
| Total | ~$708,000 |
SimServe eliminated the need for this investment entirely, while also removing ongoing hardware maintenance, configuration, and lifecycle-management costs.
Results
By deploying SimServe, Huntington Beach achieved:
- Safer SCADA deployments
- Faster testing cycles
- Reduced engineering workload
- Avoided ~$700K in hardware investment
- Improved operational confidence
SimServe enabled the City to modernize its SCADA development process without adding complexity or cost — turning testing from a risk into a strategic advantage.
See how SimServe could work in your environment
If your team struggles to safely test SCADA changes before deployment, SimServe can help you reduce risk, accelerate validation, and avoid costly hardware replication. Contact SCADAmatic to schedule a demonstration or technical discussion.