WITS DNP3

Find out more about the WITS-DNP3 protocol standard from their website https://www.witsprotocol.org/

Introduction

The WITS group was formed in 2003 by members drawn from a wide cross section of water companies and water industry suppliers, based predominantly in the UK. The team had the aim of helping utilities realise greater efficiencies by encouraging co-operation between water companies and with engineers and consultants in external supplier organisations.

The WITS-DNP3 protocol defines a standard method to achieve the utility industry telemetry control and monitoring requirements, in particular interoperability between equipment from different manufacturers.

The standard defines how to satisfy utility industry specific functional requirements using features of the DNP3 protocol.

Brodersen auto generation of WITS DNP3 application

Setup of a WITS DNP3 application is made easy using the RTU Configuration Generator – a ‘wizard’ that allows rapid creation of a WorkSuite application from configuration details that are entered in an EXCEL spread sheet. The spread sheet includes multiple work sheets for managing setup details such as RTU address, IP address, IO channels, tag names and communication port settings.

The spread sheet is loaded with default settings, making it quick to set the parameters that may be unique for your application eg. how much IO and site information.

2. Once you have completed the spread sheet configuration, hit ‘Generate’ and the application is checked and then created.

If you selected options ‘download project’ and ‘open WorkSuite’ then the project will also be sent to the RTU and WorkSuite loaded.

3. Seems a bit easy – but all of the necessary logic functions used to determine alarm status, parameters used to control various communications methods and all of the variables listed in the spread sheet have now been loaded in to the application (and sent to the RTU).

4. The example here shows how the setup of the first digital input point in the spread sheet to have a name of ‘DI00’, a DNP point address of 50 and a DNP event class of 1, has been included in the WITS DNP3 points table of the RTU application…

Web page access to setup

The auto generation functionality described above is used to create and load the RTU application. Once deployed, changes to the RTU setup and access to diagnostic information are made via the RTU web server using the ‘WITS DNP3 Slave’ pages shown below.