ELIA

The high voltage grid of the Belgian transmission system operator ELIA is the backbone of the Belgian and European network. The Belgian network forms an integral part of the continental European transmission system. This requires coordinated monitoring and a high level of security of supply. The system is continually monitored and managed by four control centers.
The replacement of the control centers necessitated the use of gateways to integrate the new technology with available components.

In order to ensure the communication with existing substations, IPCOMM has been instructed to deliver ipConv gateways to connect several RTUs (slave stations) with the SCADA system (master stations).
Some RTUs shall be connected with gateways which are placed centrally at the control center - other RTUs shall be connected with a gateway which is placed locally at the RTU side.

As hardware platform for central placement our 19" industrial PC IPC191V3 19" 1U with a CompactFlash (without any rotating parts) as mass storage is used. Up to 6.000 data points can be transmitted.
The IPC191V3 19" 1U is equipped with 2 Ethernet adapters and 16 RS-232 interfaces. RS-232 interfaces only allow asynchronous (UART conform) communication. The Procon unit is used for coupling other protocols (for instance bit synchronous or pulse length modulated protocols).

The gateways operate redundantly in "hot standby" mode. This means only one of the two devices is active at any time. The passive device monitors the active one and if the active one fails, the passive one automatically steps in and resumes communication. The active gateway sends a command to the fieldbus coupler which activates the corresponding output channel. The communication between gateway and fieldbus coupler is done via Modbus protocol. The switchover of the 16 transmission lines is initiated by the Procon switch.
The communication between ipConv gateway and SCADA is done by IEC 60870-5-104 protocol. The gateway is configured as "slave".
The communication between ipConv gateway and RTUs runs over the protocols Telegyr 102, Telegyr 065 and Tracec 130. Thereby the gateway behaves as "master".

As hardware platform for local placement in standalone operation our PC-based embedded controller SEC2 (without any rotating parts) is used. The SEC2 is suitable for mounting on a 35 mm DIN-rail and provides one Ethernet adapter and 4 RS-232/RS-485 interfaces.
The communication between that ipConv gateway and RTU is done by Telegyr 809 protocol. The gateway is configured as "master".

Especially for ELIA a software tool has been developed to automatically generate the parameterization tables and the configuration file.