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The Czech power supply market is controlled by a monopoly. The sole power distributor in the country is the company ENERGETICKE ZAVODY. Lack of competitive environment has had a negative impact on both power supply reliability and quality, and the technical condition of remote power distribution lines. Different anomalies, i.e. power supply failures, are also a frequent phenomenon in other countrie. Power supply outages are the most conspicuous of all power supply failures, but not the most frequent as compared with other network failures. Other phenomena, e.g. undervoltage, overvoltage, voltage peaks, disruption and different transient processes, prove to be of greater importance. The operating status of certain equipment does not allow anomalies or power drop-outs, as any failure might cause extreme financial or other damage to customers, i.e. power consumers, have no chance to choose from among competing suppliers for power supply quality and reliability. This has resulted in an ever growing customer effort to safeguard power supply quality and reliability. One of the most reliable appliance protection methods is the use of back-up power centres ('Power centres') consisting of an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) with the necessary capacity and a motor generator set (MTG). Different vendors offer a variety of such equipment, with different technical parameters. The diversity of power centre components from different vendors raises the issue of central administration and monitoring their operation. The project objective is to design software and hardware for both local and central remote power supply monitoring, compatible with available types of power systems and making possible remote diagnostics and administration of power centres. Due to the absence of a product offering a complex solution on the Czech market, there is an urgent need to deal with the above issues, in the context of power systems safety. The implementation of the above project will enhance power supply critical management. Remote back-up system monitoring makes permanent control the technical status of a back-up system possible, which in its turn allows for checking operability, as well as forecasting and planning the necessary service work. A Proactive approach to system failures increases the reliability of power centres. Another benefit of the project consists in increasing the life of accumulators in UPS by as much as 30% as a result of remote monitoring and diagnostics, and in reducing their purchase cost by as much as 25%. In addition, the project will have a positive environmental effect as a result of lower consumption of accumulators and the subsequent lower environmental load and lower costs of environmentally friendly disposal. Last but not least, perfect connect-up load management with maximum use of power potential will eliminate the need to change system capacity of power centres, which will reduce their purchase cost by as much as 20%. There are two ways to assure reliable power supply of important systems: 1) Uninterruptible power supply are outage-free and designed to protect powered equipments against network anomalies. Uninterruptible power supplies for short-time dropouts are designed with committed back-up time extending for approximately 10 minutes necessary for a correct shutdown of the powered equipment. Additional battery modules can be used for longer outages. According to the European standard EN 62040-3, uninterruptible power supplies are divided into: * VFD (off-line) concept uninterruptible power supplies the powered equipment against energy outages, short-term voltage drops and short-term overvoltage; * VI (line-interactive) concept uninterruptible power supplies featuring additional protection against undervoltage and input voltage interference; * VFI (on-line) concept uninterruptible power supplies additional protection against overvoltage, transient processess, frequency fluctuation and harmonic distortion and belonging to the highest category offering the maximum possible protection of backed-up equipment. This system has not been designed for long-term power supply outages. 2) Systems where permanent operation must be guaranteed even in a situation of long-term outages extending for several hours or days require 'Power Centres' consisting of an uninterruptible power supply and a motor generator set (MTG). The functioning principle is as follows: when a power supply outage occurs, the power supply function is automatically transferred onto the UPS without this having any impact on the operation of the powered equipment. In the same moment, the motor generator set starts up to be ready to take over the load in approximately 30 seconds. Usually after two minutes (depending on the settings), the uninterruptible power supplies connects up to the motor generator (MTG) power supply. In both the cases, the system is capable of continuous power supply in different situations of power network failure, but does not have the capability to identify the backup power supply demand depending on the technical status and needs of the backed-up systems. For instance, if a outage occurs, the power supply source or a power centre may be covering the whole back-up power supply demand (e.g. control servers, IT, disk fields, lighting, PBX, etc.), irrespective of their priority and importance. Therefore the uninterruptible power supply or the power centre must be re-dimensioned for the required start-up current of all such parts of equipment and designed for a longer back-up time. The system has no capability to assess by the accumulator status which of the loads are vital and which are only ancillary, and disconnect the circuits of a lesser importance in order to guarantee the maximum back-up time for the vital circuits. Solving the above issue is one of the goals of the project. The objective of the project is to develop an intelligent system: software and hardware for measurement and control of back-up systems (autonomous UPS or power centres). The project will be implemented in the following stages: - research in and development of control software and hardware components - construction of functional models - implementation of functional models in the environment - functional model tests, simulation of extreme situations. Keywords: back-up systems, power centres, congeneration units.