Soft Data Bus Framework for Distribution Substations.

Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems have proved to be one of the important ingredients for substation automation. Legacy SCADA architectures are based on proprietary hardware and software-based Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) with little scope for modifications and expansions. Current SCADA architectures are based on distributed systems with Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) based on IEC 61850. These SCADA systems are implemented with a centralized server located at control centers for performing various substation automation functions. With this kind of architecture, a local Human Machine Interface (HMI) is normally implemented to have access to the operational data at the substation level. Certain specific software applications catering to asset management functions, which are useful for the local operators, are also implemented at the substation level. All such local applications have to access data from IEDs, legacy RTUs, etc., called hardware nodes. Since these hardware nodes follow different communication interface methods, the software applications running in the desktop computers also have to adopt hardware-specific communication interface routines. Fast and reliable data transfer among these heterogeneous systems coupled with seamless integration to host applications is a technical challenge. The paper presents a generic Soft Data Bus (SDB), a communication interface framework between hardware nodes and software applications. SDB provides a common interface method on both sides which enables seamless access of data from RTUs which can easily be integrated with the local HMI and other asset management applications. It can be scaled up for a number of hardware nodes and data points without sacrificing much of performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]