Integrating low cost platforms on electrical power systems for control and condition monitoring

Nowadays, the electric power systems play a fundamental role in our society, since the electric energy transport until the final consumer. Under this context, the substations are an essential component of these systems, because they operate as a point of interconnection between the electrical transport networks and the energy distribution systems. Due to the importance of this type of facilities, the maintenance of substations is a strategic aspect of this process, to guarantee their availability and a rational life cycle cost. By consequence, the automation applied in the substations corresponds to an added value for flexible control and assets condition monitoring, allowing the guarantee of reliability, efficiency, and quality of the energy delivered to the end user. In order to improve the control systems, it is necessary to provide these facilities with technologies that offer interoperability and critical time control of assets. The Industrial Ethernet communication protocols correspond to an alternative within the automation and maintenance tools implemented in the electric distribution networks; this type of protocols stand out in a positive way in the market due to its communications in real-time, high data transmission rates between physical assets, use of flexible network topologies for communication between assets, and a large number of nodes connected in the network. This paper presents a simple and reliable way to integrate Industrial Ethernet communication protocols through the use of low cost electronics platforms such as, for example, Arduino, Raspberry PI, BeagleBone, among others existing in the market. These protocols integrate friendly HMI (Human Machine Interface) and SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) tools. It also presents a system that has the capacity to make the communication among the different physical assets through the FINS (Factory Interface Network Service) protocol via Ethernet network, being this system implemented in UNIX operating systems. This approach also permits to simulate the behavior of a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) from the viewpoint of the interaction with OMRON industrial equipment, remapping its memory and enabling the acquisition of data from various devices via Industrial Ethernet protocols, such as Ethernet/IP, Modbus/TCP, POWERLINK, among others.