Building Smart Grids with Eclipse IoT Technology: Electrical Substation Automation Revisited
9Ten years ago I was working on two separate projects for building SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) Systems for monitoring and controlling of electrical substations. The first system was based on a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) as a RTU (Remote Terminal Unit) in the substation and a commercially available SCADA in the remote monitoring and controlling center. The second system had a custom controller as a RTU and a custom build SCADA System.
Both systems are used to show and record the required process parameters like:
current, voltage and power measurements;
control the states of the circuit breakers for each lead in the substation;
keep a log of events that have happened in the system.
The goal of the systems is to enable a better overview of the current state of a part from the electrical power distribution network for the workers in the substation and the remote center .
Seeing the technology going forward in the last couple of years made me think about if there is a way to improve the infrastructure, reliability and the maintenance processes. That was the basis of the research conducted as a part of my master thesis in the field of Intelligent Information Systems - combining various Eclipse IoT technologies to build an electrical substation automation system.
The goal of this talk is to give an overview how we implemented the electrical substation automation systems 10 years ago, to show how a better and more efficient system can be build by combining various Eclipse IoT technologies like Kura, Eclipse SCADA and Eclipse Smart Home and to discuss the benefits and the improvements of the proposed solution.
The old system will be rebuild in such a way that:
Eclipse Kura runs as a RTU in the electrical substation;
Eclipse SCADA is used as a central point for monitoring and controlling the system;
and optionally Eclipse Smart Home as a platform to monitor the power consumption and behaviour of the end users in order to avoid network overloading and power outages.
Jovan Kostovski