How replacing manual monitoring with an automated control system for the trams’ and trolleybuses’ traction substations allowed green public transport management municipalities in the Netherlands to remotely monitor, manage, and retrieve information on emergencies at the substations in real time.
Green public transport powered by electricity is now widely used in modern cities. There are different means of transportation that use various electricity storage and delivery methods. But the most famous among them are trams and trolleybuses.
A complex overhead wiring network infrastructure is used to deliver electric power to consumers. This includes kilometers of wires stretched along routes, carrying current and powering transport.
The so-called traction substations are used for delivery of electric current to the various points of a contact network. Traction substations are complex structures consisting of a set of high-power electrical installations, carrying out transformation and switching roles.
These facilities require constant monitoring and management. Usually, there are at least 10-15 substations within a city. Manually monitoring all the substations and ensuring the continuous operation is obviously very difficult. In this case, the use of automated control and management systems would certainly help consolidate and improve the time of response to various kinds of failures and emergencies, thereby directly increasing the uptime.
We needed to develop an automated control system, consisting of a hardware-software complex.
It was necessary that the control system would allow to remotely monitor, manage and retrieve information on emergencies at the substation.
In some success-stories, the system would automatically carry out control actions aimed at restoring efficient management.
This task was quite specific. We, therefore, built an architecture based on the tasks assigned to us. We selected solutions for this architecture, which meet the customer’s requirements and comply with the operating conditions. We also focused on price while selecting solutions. We were looking for the most favorable combination of price and technology needed to solve the task.
Constant monitoring and control of substations
Remote retrieval of information on emergencies at substations
Ensuring continuous operation of substations
Restoration of efficient automated management
SCADA
Modbus RTU
1-wire
SPI
GPRS
SNMP
RTOS
ZeroMQ
Node.js
Advantech 4000
Advantech 5000
Embedded PCs
