Build practical expertise in IP-based utility telecontrol. This focused guide presents IEC 60870-5-104 as an engineering discipline, connecting protocol rules with the architecture, configuration, software behavior, cybersecurity, and operational practices required in modern automation networks.
Beginning with telecontrol fundamentals, the book explains how control centers, remote terminal units, intelligent electronic devices, and substations exchange information across local, wide-area, and routed networks. It clarifies the relationship between IEC 60870-5-104 and serial telecontrol profiles, then follows a communication session from TCP connection establishment through data transfer, supervision, sequence numbering, and orderly shutdown.
What you will learn
- Design resilient communication architectures using segmentation, redundancy, routed links, and availability zones.
- Interpret ASDUs, type identifications, variable structure qualifiers, causes of transmission, common addresses, and information object addresses.
- Model single-point and double-point indications, measurements, integrated totals, commands, set points, bit strings, and protection events.
- Apply quality descriptors, CP24Time2a and CP56Time2a time tags, event ordering, and clock synchronization to real operational data.
- Implement general interrogation, counter interrogation, select-before-execute, direct-execute, command confirmation, and activation procedures.
- Create consistent addressing plans, signal registers, timer settings, window parameters, configuration baselines, and interoperability documentation.
- Structure reliable client and server software with state machines, frame validation, receive buffers, event and command queues, backpressure controls, reconnection logic, and resynchronization.
- Protect telecontrol links through threat modeling, firewalls, access control, secure remote access, monitoring, logging, and security evidence.
Designed for engineering work
Each chapter combines protocol concepts with implementation decisions and a practical example. Readers trace complete session startup and shutdown sequences, decode status indications, process timestamped protection trips, operate and verify a remote breaker, build signal and address registers, structure a communication service, plan defense in depth, conduct gateway acceptance testing, and resolve intermittent station communication loss.
The later chapters provide a disciplined approach to requirements-based testing, conformance and negative testing, packet capture analysis, failover validation, operational monitoring, fault diagnosis, stale or duplicate data handling, sequence errors, backup, change control, and recovery. Checklists and engineering viewpoints help teams turn standard terminology into dependable system behavior.
Suitable for: control-system engineers, SCADA and substation automation specialists, RTU and gateway developers, commissioning teams, network and cybersecurity professionals, system integrators, and technical managers responsible for reliable utility communications.
Use this book as a practical reference for designing, implementing, testing, securing, and maintaining IEC 60870-5-104 networks from the first architecture decision through day-to-day operation.
