SUBNET Solutions Inc. (Calgary, Alberta, Canada) has signed a purchase agreement with Alabama Power Co., a subsidiary of Southern Co. (Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.) for the supply of its Substation Suite software products and associated professional services. SUBNET's Substation Suite software will be an integral part of Alabama Power's new substation networking system. This agreement also establishes terms for future deployment of the Substation Suite solution by Alabama Power and other Southern Co. power companies.

The Substation Suite software is designed to provide simple yet secure corporate intranet access to substation information required by engineering, maintenance and other utility departments without interfering with, or affecting, mission critical operational systems such as EMS/SCADA systems.

The Substation Suite is a set of three software applications designed for the Microsoft Windows 2000/XP Professional operating system. The primary application, Substation Explorer, is the Substation Human Machine Interface software application capable of collecting data from substation devices and creating dynamic single lines, alarm annunciator and trend displays. These displays can be viewed locally in the substation or securely throughout a utility's corporate network via a Web browser. Substation Explorer is also capable of sending e-mail alerts to utility personnel, notifying them of key substation alarms, and interfacing with corporate data historians for advanced substation data-logging applications.

The second software product in the suite is the Substation Communicator, a port-tunneling application that allows utility personnel to remotely access the configuration and maintenance ports of substation intelligent electronic devices. The third product, Substation Network Monitor, is a network-enabled version of the ASE2000 Protocol Test Set application. This application extends the advanced capabilities of the ASE2000 Test Set, so utility communication personnel can monitor, analyze and troubleshoot protocol communication traffic remotely, eliminating the need to travel to the substation.
Circle 202 on Reader Service Card or visit freeproductinfo.net/tdw