Electrical safety enhanced with BIM, SCADA and digital twin integration. A case study of a MV-LV substation

Electrical safety is a critical aspect in design, operation and maintenance of all electrical installations. From planning stage, it is necessary to strictly adhere to the regulations that provide for the complete safety of the installation and to establish an adequate maintenance plan for the duration of its life. However, there are unpredictable situations, such as faults, that can potentially risk the safety of people and equipment installation, leading in some extreme cases to major incidents such as blackouts and fires. The digitalization is leading to huge benefits in every application area, and electrical safety is one of the aspects that could gain the greatest advantage from it. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how the integration of Building Information Modeling (BIM), supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA) and Digital Twins can make a great contribution to increase the electrical safety and lifetime of the elements that constitute an MV-LV electrical substation. At first, the concepts of 3d modeling characteristic of BIM and how it in most installations it’s is merely a static model that provides predefined and immutable information will be introduced. Such a model, which may be a valid reference for architectural installations, is not so valid in engineering ones, where the parameters that constitute the installation are changeable and iridescent. For this reason, it is possible to combine BIM with a supervision and control system (SCADA), so as to rise a dynamic digital twin, which is much more useful for purposes such as monitoring and security of the entire plant. The case study proposed will highlight this aspect, showing the strengths of the project and the innovation of the proposed model compared to the current state of art. This paper is an extended version of the conference poster presentation 2023 Electrical Safety Workshop [1]