IEEE PES International Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe - ISGT Europe 2022, Novi Sad (Serbia). 10-12 October 2022
Summary:
Modbus TCP is a communication protocol widely used in industrial applications and to communicate with energy assets such as inverters or data loggers. The communications technologies involved in the management of distributed energy resources (DER) should prove their ability to include new units in the operation while fulfilling functional requirements.
This paper studies the scalability performance of Modbus TCP protocol over Ethernet to monitor and control DER in a positive energy district (PED) environment. This use case is part of an Innovative Element (IE) being demonstrated in the city of Dijon within the RESPONSE project. The analysis was carried out considering different bit error ratios (BER) and number of servers. As performance indicator, the time spent by the client to poll all the servers (i.e., polling time) was measured, as it is the most restrictive functional requirement in the use case analysed, requiring it to be one minute.
Results from simulations show how increasing BER and the number of devices in the network impact the total polling time. Despite the average polling time complied with the required one in most cases, its standard deviation significantly increased with BER. If the transmission medium presents a low BER, Modbus TCP has a great scalability potential to control and monitor devices that require data exchanges every minute. In addition, the maximum number of devices to keep a good performance is considered appropriate for its application in a PED environment. Future works may assess the impact of distance or topology on use case’s performance.
Spanish layman's summary:
La escalabilidad de un sistema que usa Modbus TCP para controlar recursos energéticos distribuidos es analizada considerando distintos ratios de error de bit y número de servidores. El tiempo empleado por el cliente para encuestar todos los servidores fue usado como principal indicador.
English layman's summary:
The scalability of a Modbus TCP control and monitoring system for distributed energy resources is carry out considering different bit error ratios and number of servers. The time spent by the client to poll all the servers, which was the most restrictive requirement, was measured as main indicator.
Keywords: Modbus TCP, Scalability, Distributed Energy Resources, Communication protocol, Ethernet, ICT, BER, Per-formance evaluation
DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISGT-Europe54678.2022.9960319
Published in ISGT Europe 2022, pp: 1-6, ISBN: 978-1-6654-8033-8
Publication date: 2022-11-28.
Citation:
N. Rodríguez Pérez, J. Matanza, G. López, V. Stojanovic, Scalability evaluation of a Modbus TCP control and monitoring system for Distributed Energy Resources, IEEE PES International Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Europe - ISGT Europe 2022, Novi Sad (Serbia). 10-12 October 2022. In: ISGT Europe 2022: Conference proceedings, ISBN: 978-1-6654-8033-8
