DNP protocol

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Thread Starter

ealonso

Hi list:

I am implementing DNP 3.0 protocol and I need some kind of mechanism for testing it.

Does anyone know any software or recommend me any equipment that I can use for this?

Thank you.
 
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Darold Woodward

There are two choices that I have worked with extensively. We use both extensively. Both are available as a less expensive version that uses your PC as the DNP master. There are also monitor mode versions that snoop on traffic
between two devices using a special two-port serial card.

PTI Plus (www.pti-plus.com) is an excellent Windows test set designed for DNP. It is easy (if you understand a little about DNP) for the casual user to navigate and test basic functions. It does not have the capability to intentionally corrupt messages and send them to see what happents (like bad CRCs, etc). This test set covers about 90% or more of the testing we do
including most of the conformance tests. Our field people use this test set extensively for assisting customers and we use it in-house for testing and demonstration. We have 12 licenses for this software.

ASE (www.applsyseng.com) makes a test set that is really a generic test set. This means that the terminology is not necessarily standard DNP, but all the features of DNP are there. Also, this test set can be used to generate intentionally corrupted messages to test your slave device. We have some old DOS versions of this software that we use heavily and have not yet tried the
Windows version. I expect that the Windows version has many of the ease-of-use features of the PTI software mentioned above. We have 3 licenses for the DOS version of this software.

There are a couple of other choices that you can see listed at the DNP user's group website (www.dnp.org).

You will also make support of your implementation much easier if you do two things. First, test per the conformance tests that were approved by the User's Group last year. Second, do some basic interoperability tests with the devices
you are most likely to be connected to. For example, our DNP devices are often applied connected to RTUs. We have several here and test all of our new implementations with the RTUs to verify that everything works smoothly before our customers try it for us.

I'd appreciate it if you could tell me (off line from the list) some more about what your application is and what type of DNP implementation you have created (master or slave).

Darold Woodward PE
SEL Inc.
[email protected]
 
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