2022.06.15

The Bendes Memorial Plaque was awarded to our CEO Ervin Szabó for his 40 years of dedication in the field of control engineering in the electricity industry at the 7th Defence and Control Engineering Forum in Zalakaros.

The Plaque was founded in 1989 by Dr. Tombor Antal, former CEO of MAVIR and is honoured after Dr. Tibor Bendes, a State Award-winning electrical engineer, who was one of the technical managers of the Hungarian Electrical Works Trust in the 1970s.

The plaque is awarded annually by the Electronics and Information Technology Department of the Hungarian Electrotechnical Association to professionals for their outsanding work in the fields of relay protection, automation, control engineering and cyber security.

The Bendes Memorial Plaque was presented by MEE President Lajos Gelencsér and Memorial Plaque Founder Dr. Antal Tombor.

Ervin Szabó's contribution in the electricity industry

He graduated from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Budapest University of Technology with a degree in Measurement and Control Technology in 1982. He joined MMG Automation Works as a software developer. He took full responsibility for MMG's SAM85 substation RTU software within the first weeks of employment already. As the predecessor of the Prolan Profield, SAM85 RTUs were installed in most of the transformer substations of the power utilities, so he had the opportunity to visit many substations and became familiar with the power grid systems and technologies on site.

As an experienced RTU software developer, he wrote the software for the data acquisition and processing (AFRT) system running on 40 computers at Unit 3-4 of the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. in the mid-1980s.

After developing several RTU systems for the Soviet oil and gas industry, he started developing local display systems (HAM) for transformer substations with Mikroszoft Gmk - the predecessor of Prolan. As a member of the 4-person team he developed the graphical user operation interface. On behalf of OVIT, led by Péter Görgey, they built the first Hungarian IBM PC transformer substation local display in Nagybátony, followed by the development of a 2x2 screen, heat-saving mini SCADA for OVIT's substation in Debrecen. The leader of the development team was István Sarbó, who sadly is no longer with us. The HAMs were soon installed in the vast majority of the substations. Together with his MMG colleagues - led by Ferenc Sörös, they founded Prolan in 1990, in which he played a leading roles at various levels from the beginning.

He was leading the development of the Linux-based XGRAM SCADA platform in the 1990s. Under his leadership, this platform was used to build the ZEUS power plant control center and the railway overhead line and traffic control center, that are still in operation today in more than 100 applications in the power industry and railways. The same systems are still in operation today in the Demas KDSZ, the MAVIR KKEK and many substations.

He extended his degree in electrical engineering with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) in 2001, also from BME.

Deputy CEO since 2007 and later CEO, alongside his management responsibilities Prolan Zrt., he continues to be primarily involved in the management of the technical area and product development. At present, he is directly in charge of the development of the RKV, HKV, AMR, lockout devices and the Steuerbox, a relay unit for the control of the smart metering system in Germany.

As a member of MEE since his MMG days, he has published several articles in Electrical Engineering and has presented several speeches at the MEE annual meetings, the “Vándorgyűlés”.

Warmest congratulations to Ervin Szabó for this great recognition, that confirms our high level of professionalism and excellence within the industry!