IDCS visits The Plant

IDCS recently visited an upstart vertical farm known as The Plant, located in the Back of the Yards in Chicago’s historic stockyards.  The first of its kind, The Plant’s open house showcased its plans for utilizing existing materials and sustainable design to convert the 96,000ft² space, a century old meat-packing facility, into a zero-waste operation.  The conceptual design will see many parts of the building leased to tenants (e.g. a brewery, bakery, and a hydroponic turn-key systems supplier) whose products and waste can be used by other tenants; other areas of the plant will be transformed into communal kitchens which can be rented by aspiring food industry entrepreneurs by the day, week, or month, rather than needing thousands in capital to open a store-front or buy equipment.

Since this grass-roots effort is driven entirely by volunteers, making professional tradesmen and engineers are hard to come by, IDCS has decided to lend its professional services to The Plant as often as is reasonable.  As you can see, there is much work to be done.

IDCS begins work on Joliet Bridge Automation

IDCS is working with Modjeski & Masters, Inc on six operable IDOT bridges over the Des Plaines river in Joliet, IL. Each of the six bridges is subject to both automobile and pedestrian traffic, while the thoroughfare below is subject to varying levels of maritime traffic, both commercial and private in nature (e.g. freight barges and sailboats).  Whereas each bridge is monitored at all times from its respective local bridge house by an IDOT operator, IDOT is seeking to implement an automation process to control all 6 bridges from one remote location (Bridge St. office).  This command center would necessitate the monitoring of all six bridges by no less than three (3) operators at any given time; the command room would have 3 operator stations, each with the ability to view and control any one of the six bridges and its associated cameras.  The role of IDCS in this project is to design the connectivity between the bridges, their cameras, and the Bridge St. control center as well as to design the layout of the control center workstations.  It is the aim of IDCS to design separate redundant fiber optic communication layouts for both the operation of the bridges and their associated surveillance system.