DNP gateway opens communications
A
Copa-Data product story
Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team
Feb 27, 2006
Distributed network protocol gateway added to Scada system to provide open communications over a wide geographical area.
Copa-Data has developed a DNP3 (distributed network protocol) gateway for its Zenon 6.2 Scada system.
This complements typical Scada master operation with slave operation that allows utilities to integrate more flexible distributed control architectures.
Widely used in the electric utility industry, DNP3 provides open communications over a wide geographical area.
In a DNP3 network, a control room Scada master typically supervises distributed plant.
Zenon has supported this DNP3 master functionality for several years by means of a software driver.
However, utilities are increasingly using Zenon for substation automation, providing a cost reduction compared with traditional DCS-based systems.
With the addition of the DNP3 gateway plug-in, Zenon can report directly to a higher level supervisory control system.
Because both the Zenon Scada system and DNP3 protocol are open technologies, the local substation can report to many different systems supporting DNP3.
Open connectivity with disparate networks and support for DNP3 facilitates plant modernisation.
Upgrading a regional substation covering a wide geographical area to a Scada-based system is becoming increasingly popular due to the flexibility of operation and the cost savings made possible by the use of more economical open computer hardware.
Localised control is possible with Zenon because the software is designed for reliability.
Any Zenon terminal on a Zenon network such as DNP3 can be selected as a back up server with one click of the mouse.
This backup server is then guaranteed to receive data without loss should a failure occur, ensuring the fail safe redundant operation that is essential to electricity infrastructure.
Features beneficial to redundant power distribution control systems are central to Zenon operation.
For example, all data is stored as a trilogy containing the data itself, Zenon automatically adding a millisecond-accurate time stamp and the data status.
Data validity information is essential because power infrastructure is exposed to a rugged environment covering a wide geographical area, necessitating redundant systems.
A Zenon server could be used to monitor a number of redundant RTUs.
If Zenon detected a communication breakdown, any data received would be declared invalid using the status bits.
Invalid data could be excluded from archiving or trending.
International electric utilities use Zenon because it is a reliable open platform that saves engineering time with its built-in features for the power industry.
In addition to DNP3, Zenon supports over 300 drivers and gateways including IEC60870, popular among European utilities.
Drivers and gateways are plugged in to the modular Zenon platform providing open vendor independent operation.
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