Real-time Health Condition Monitoring of SCADA Infrastructure of Power Transmission Systems Control Centers

The infrastructure for the supervision, control and data acquisition (SCADA) is critical for the operation of the electrical transmission network due to the complexity of the modern electrical power systems which are made of a big number of components and technical constraints for its operation. One failure in one of the many devices that are part of the SCADA could produce a failure in the supervision and control of one substation, one region or even a whole country; and because the hardware infrastructure needed to implement a SCADA system might come to be massive in terms of the numbers of devices for the communication network, servers and more; it becomes crucial to have a well-structured and efficient monitoring system for the SCADA infrastructure of any power transmission control center. In this paper it is proposed a monitoring scheme based on the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) used to get realtime data of the devices involved in these systems, such as: servers, communication switches, workstations, routers and firewalls; and also, the real-time monitoring of essential software functions, not only from the SCADA but from the Energy Management System (EMS) as well. The acquired data is processed into early warning signs (alarms), tendency graphs and visualizations with real-time data that allows the administrators to manage the SCADA infrastructure in a preventive and not in a reactive manner, which secures the operation against failures and events. This scheme was implemented in four electrical power transmission control centers in South America which operate up to 500 kV grids. The implementation showed clear benefits in the use of this novel scheme because the detection, diagnostics and solution for possible risks in the system could be managed in an earlier stage than it used to be, which incremented the availability and reliability of the SCADA system infrastructure.