A Review on SCADA Systems in Indian Railways

SCADA, a computer system for gathering and analyzing real time data, is an acronym for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. SCADA systems are employed all over the world to monitor and control a plant or any equipment in various industries major ones being telecommunications, water, old and gas, energy and transportation. SCADA Systems are employed by Indian Railways to monitor and control the Traction Power distribution. The systems employed encompass transfer of data between a SCADA host computer and a number of Remote Terminal Units (RTUs) and/or Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) and operator terminals. These systems were proprietary in nature and no standard specifications were followed concerning hardware or protocol. Systems from different vendors cannot co-exist in a given network. In this view, Indian Railways formulated SPORT protocol for data transaction and corrective action of tripping the circuit breakers in case of overload etc. This paper is a review on how SCADA Systems are employed by Indian Railways to achieve protection and automation of power supply, acquisition and storage of parameters of power supply, monitoring and controlling the entire power supply system, alarm and logging system, load management, load shedding, power quality monitoring and management.