SCADA in hydropower plants

For the purpose of improving the supervisory control in a hydropower plant, the SCADA application was built during the general overhaul of the Miljacka hydropower plant on the river Krka in Croatia. The lowest level of the execution of the controlling algorithms is on the SIEMENS PLCs S7-400. The SCADA application is the top of the supervisory control structure. The control application is in a form of the enclosed logical parts of the process displayed on the individual control panels used for the supervisory control. The communication of the SCADA used with PLCs is realised by the communication server Applicom PC 2000 ETH, using SINEC H1 (industrial Ethernet) protocol via fibre optics. The SCADA is operated using the National Instruments programming package LOOKOUT on the operating system Windows NT 4.0.