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On the white wall is a typical setup of a modern wind park. It is divided into an on shore (top) and an off shore (bottom) network. Commonly the management is run from the on shore part of the network, because it is easier to have a management station inside an office building that is accessible by foot.
Looking at the off shore network, each RS20 and MICE20 form one wind turbine, where one switch is built in the foot, and the other in the head unit of the turbine.
The on shore devices form a redundant backbone. The switches in this part of the network run a redundancy protocol (MRP, RSTP) and the two routers utilize the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) which offers the possibility to have a master and a backup router. The off shore devices in real applications can be located many kilometers from the coast where a massive deep sea cable connects the on shore with the off shore network. These switches are configured in a layer 2 network and redundantly connected to the backbone via optical cable with Fast Ethernet.
In case of a segregated turbine, it can be very expensive to service such an incident, since the turbines are located in the sea where they are only accessible by boat or helicopter. All off shore devices are redundantly connected in a ring or sub ring, giving the application the highly recommended safety it needs. Sub rings are connected over a base ring. Devices in different sub rings are able to communicate with each other, but are fully independent if a fault occurs in the other sub ring.
Additionally wireless devices are installed on some of the turbines. A wireless Point 2 Point (P2P) connection to an Access Point on shore assures further availability.
Hirschmann’s Network Management Software (Industrial HiVision) is shown on the center display.
Mainly it covers 3 aspects:
Unlike many conventional network management tools, Industrial HiVision has the great advantage of automatically displaying the exact topology of a network. This is accomplished by LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). The software collects information via the LLDP and SNMP protocols and develops a structure of the entire network and finally displays the result in the management interface.
This function is called Topology Discovery. It is a convenient solution for giving an overview over large networks.
Industrial HiVision provides a server installation, which runs on every common operating system: Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Server and Linux.
The software enables centralized configuration of any device in the network; either individually or any number of devices at the same time. For individual configuration the software accesses the devices user interface and provides the full configuration scope to the administrator. For multiple configurations Industrial HiVision offers a function called Multi Config. Any number of devices can be selected and manipulated at the same time: software updates, configuration changes and finally saving all the configurations.
The server is remotely available for clients running Industrial HiVision: if the server provides a connection to the internet, configurations can be made from anywhere around the world.
Another aspect that Industrial HiVision covers is monitoring. Through the visualization in the user interface it is possible to constantly observe the entire network. Any disturbances will immediately be detected and displayed on the screen. Additionally a real time event log records every change and assigns the correct date, description and severity of the event.
Either the management station regularly polls the network and asks for changes. Or the management station is configured as a trap destination, to which the devices forward the information, if a disturbance occurs.
