Brodersen demo their powerful WITS DNP3 compliant RTU32 at WITS EXPO 2016

BRODERSEN were one of a number of suppliers that exhibited at the latest WITS EXPO 2016 held in Peterborough UK.

The Exhibition and conference was arranged by the WITS organisation committee in conjunction with Anglian Water and was very well attended by all the major water companies in the UK.

The main aims of the event were:
– For the Suppliers and Water companies to share experiences of the deployment phases
– Demonstrate the inter-operability between manufacturers equipment
– Present the future plans and developments for the WITS protocol
– Further develop working relationships between Suppliers and the Water companies

The WITS organisation, www.witsprotocol.org, was setup by a group of suppliers and a number of the UK Water companies with a view to develop a protocol that not only was used by all suppliers products, but that also included valuable functionality that the Water companies required.

Since its initial conception, a number of companies have subsequently embraced the WITS theory and developed products to further expand the variety of products that use the protocol.

The development of the WITS protocol originally selected DNP3 as the basis of the initial definitions, but more recent progress has looked to integrate MQTT and IoT into the offering.

Although these are early days in the future development of MQTT and IoT, some exciting progress was highlighted at the EXPO, and as one of the many protocols offered in the Brodersen RTU32 range of RTUs, the integration of WITS using MQTT would be the next logical step.


The event had a network in place to enable all the supplier products to connect to the various SCADA companies products and demonstrate the interface between RTUs and SCADA products.

BRODERSEN demonstrated their powerful RTU32 units with the WITS DNP3 protocol that are currently being implemented by both Thames Water Utilities Limited and Anglian Water Services under their respective frameworks.

The day was a great success and enabled both suppliers and water companies to not only further develop great working relationships, but to also gain an understanding of one another’s challenges and future needs.

The future looks great for WITS.

 

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Overview - RTU protocols and driver setup
Your RTU application may simply be an 'end point' and only need to interface with a SCADA host or other master device - or it may need to 'sing and dance'...
1- Select what you need
The RTU Configuration Tool allows selection of protocols and hardware.
2 - Create a project in WorkSuite
Then define IO points, create some logic and additional variables eg. this waste water pump station controller accumulates pump statistics and computes derived flow totals from change in wet well volume.
3 - Setup DNP3 slave for this example
Use the Fieldbus Configurator to add the DNP3 slave protocol, create a channel (how to communicate), create a 'session' (who to communicate with), then set application layer parameters (messaging rules).
4 - 'Variables of interest'
Variables (data points in the RTU database) can be 'exposed' to one or more protocols, by referencing them in either the fieldbus editor (simple protocols like Modbus), or including them in a 'profile' (advanced protocols like IEC61850 and DNP3). For DNP3 slave, the variables of interest are dragged in to the DNP3S profile, where they can be associated to object types, given a point address, event class, reporting limits etc.
5 - Prove it works
Connect the RTU to the SCADA host and prove the data values are transferred correctly. If you need to troubleshoot the message contents - use the RTU web interface utility to capture network data packets for viewing in Wireshark to quickly resolve issues.
6 - Make it smarter!
The WorkSuite logic tools allow you to interact with the RTU communications tasks, to enhance the monitoring and control of your data transfer processes. This example DNP3 slave RTU is monitoring the unread events buffers and is able to manipulate point object properties (event class, reporting thresholds etc) and network interface properties (IP address of the host and peer slaves that it may be communicating with).
Conclusion - enjoy having a 'future proof' RTU...
Your RTU requirements will evolve over time, so when you need more I/O, comm ports, protocols or RTU functionality - know it can be easily implemented in a Brodersen RTU.
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