Energy Management and Distribution Systems

Control and automation systems are used in the energy sector both to manage the production, the transmission, and distribution to the power grid. The integration with monitoring, control and protection systems has as an objective the continuous control of all the plant's variables and the fulfillment of all the necessary actions to make the plant work correctly and to maintain the security of all machinery.

Monitoring, control and protection systems are used for many functions, as the development of "energy management systems", "smart grid" management, integration of "substation automation systems". monitoring of distributions networks, development of "load shedding systems" or "load rejection systems".

The development of systems and solutions in order to measure, monitor, protect and control electric networks of low, medium, high and very high voltage, is realized using different products and integrated devices operating horizontally on the whole energy chain, from production to distribution, to transmission to the industry.

Among the many parts of a monitoring and control system, the most used equipment is SCADAs (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition), PLCs (Programmable Logic Controller) and RTUs (Remote Terminal Unit).

SICAM SAS and SICAM eRTU has been used for a few systems.

Usually, substation telecontrol and automation systems have been developed using SICAM PAS and SICAM 1703. The SICAM PAS is an open and modular system, designed for energy automation. Specific functions for the automation system are combined with a programmable logic control system.

SICAM 1703 systems are made for automation, telecontrol, and communication for electric networks where high performance and system redundancy are necessary. Integration of SICAM 1703 is done by using several RTUs (SICAM AK3, SICAM AK 1703, SICAM TM, SICAM MIC, SICAM A8000) configured with the programming tool SICAM TOOLBOX II.

Integrated control and monitoring systems also have a gateway function, since they have to make the different type of devices talk and they have to move acquired data towards remote systems. Several different protocols are used to allow the different devices to communicate.

Furthermore, we realized systems of analysis and malfunctions localization on an electrical network using the following malfunctions acquisition, archiving and visualization: OSCOP P, SICAM PQS e SICAM PQ Analyzer.

Among the activities done for the realization of these projects, the following are the activities:

• Defining documentation analysis and identification of the software development tools apt to create a product in compliance with project details;
• monitoring and control stations set up based on the software package required by the client;
• software applications development (SCADA, gateway), automatization logics design for the several devices (network switch, PLC, RTU, GPS);
• internal testing, integrated testing with other suppliers and factory testing on site;
• launch on site;
• development of the project's documents (defining documents, users manuals, maintenance manuals);
• users training on the functioning of the monitoring and control system;
• service care, customer care, and maintenance.