Integrating IED’s in a IEC 60870-5-104 SCADA system

Cost-Effective Solution:
As many Electricity Distributing Companies in Europe are more and more monitoring their secundary substations - transformator stations from 10-36 kV to 220-400V -, there is a continual effort going on to find solutions that are both functional and cost- effective. All system operators in Europe will be organizing the modernization of this infrastructure in the next 5 to 10 years. The theme is the following: in the following years, meter-and power quality data, alarms and others must be collected also on the lower segment of the distribution network, especially in the secondary transformer stations. These meter and status information per station are not as plentiful and exactly as needed in the higher segments, but the measuring points are much more numerous (from several hundred to 40,000-50,000 cabs and more per infrastructure of a network manager). The budgets for this monitoring of such cabines are much more restraint. Often a SCADA IEC 60870-5-104 system is used for monitoring the devices in-the-field. Therefor, the first device we are launching is the DinBox RTU M4 (datasheet) which features '5 star quality' and is especially conceived to integrate cost-effectively all Modbus based IED devices into a IEC 60870-5-104 SCADA system: Integration of a IEC 60870-5-104 Slave functionality + Integration of a wireless module - GPRS, 3G, LTE Cat.1, LTE Cat.M1, NB IoT... + Industrial features: Security (TLS), DINrail, power back-up system using supercapacitors, High-End Certfication, AC or DC Power Supply, Unblockable Watchdog system, Digital inputs (8) and outputs (2), Analog inputs (2) + Integration of a Modbus RTU Master functionality (RS-485) or Modbus TCP/IP Client functionality (Ethernet) (Roadmap 2019) + a Management Tool for the RTU infrastructure (Roadmap 2019): Firmware upgrades, Remote parametrization, Health check...

fig. 1: '5 star quality' integration of the DinBox RTU M4

A typical IEC 60870-5-104/Modbus MV/LV Substation Scenario:
The DinBox RTU M4 can be connected for instance to a Fault Passage Indicator such as Horstmann's 'CompassB' or to typical low Voltage measuring solutions such as Socomec's 'Digiware', WAGO instruments or, as in the case of Belgian DSO Infrax, a measuring device such as the Gossen Metrawatt 'A2000'.  All these devices are connected through a Modbus RTU serial interface which is 'mapped' to the IEC 60870-5-104 slave in the RTU. In this way Modbus registers or other objects can easily be read in an IEC 60870-5-104 SCADA environment. 

Fig.2: A typical IEC 60870-5-104/Modbus MV/LV Substation Scenario: