DC Systems recently announced Version 6.0 of its RT Smart Grid Platform. The company has included new and advanced capabilities which help in enhancing reliability and resilience in substations. Furthermore, Version 6.0 delivers substantial cost benefits with respect to deploying and management of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems across control rooms and substations.

In a release, Randy Smith, SCADA Manager at PG&E (News - Alert) said, "This latest release from DC Systems will help us to implement a strategy that both strengthens the resiliency of our substation controls and facilitates better, more cost-effective practices for maintaining our SCADA software.

Up until now, managing and configuring substation SCADA systems requires users to implement a series of repetitive tasks. Other challenges include a wide budget and lengthy experts' time; these issues are proving to be a major as the number of automated substations and data points is quickly expanding. RT 6.0 at present is the only solution which can address these issues for all substation SCADA systems at scale.

DC Systems CEO, Douglass Campbell said, "For the past two decades, we have worked closely with our customers to develop leading control software for transmission and distribution systems. With RT 6.0, we wanted to leap ahead of the growing challenges of scaling substation automation and sharing data with systems and users within and outside the utility.”

The RT Smart Grid Platform 6.0 has been designed to address a number of operational and IT staff requirements. Highlighting features of the solution inlcude - Distributed Intelligence which means each substation deployment can function and operate independently along with its very own human-machine interface (HMI) for addressing safety concerns and or for increased reliability; Centralized Operational Management which enable control centers to have complete visibility and control further enhanced with integrated and drill-down views; Centralized IT Management  which allows SCADA administrators to easily update all instances using a single configuration database. This also helps in ensuring complete consistency for the system and helps in lowering maintenance costs.

The Automated Configuration enhancement included in the RT 6.0 helps in ingestion of the IEC (News - Alert) 61850 standard configuration files collected from substation design tools which means SCADA databases can be automatically configured. Not only does this help in lowering configuration time, but in also delivering substantial cost savings.

Additionally, the Data Acquisition, Management and Communication feature of the RT 6.0 platform helps in collecting data from all devices and systems and helps in smart management of serving data to systems which need it.