IEC 61850: What you need to know about functionality and practical implementation

Today, all utility users and manufacturers recognize the desire and the need to merge the communications capabilities of all IEDs in a substation, or even across the entire power network. This wide-area interconnection can provide not only data gathering and setting capability, but also remote control. Furthermore, multiple IEDs can share data or control commands at high speed to perform new distributed protection, control, and automation functions. This sort of cooperative control operation has the potential to supersede and eliminate much of the dedicated control wiring in a substation, as well as costly special-purpose communications channels between the stations and around the power network. Many utilities have already installed systems of interconnected IEDs, which provide some degree of centralized substation and system monitoring and control. In practice, the majority of information available in installed IEDs is abandoned and left uncollected because traditional integration techniques were designed to exclusively support SCADA. Rather than being conceived as another protocol, IEC 61850 was created to be an internationally standardized method of communications and integration with goals of supporting systems built from multi-vendor IEDs networked together to perform protection, monitoring, automation, metering, and control. This paper is the second in a series documenting the evolution of the IEC 61850 standard. The first paper, titled "Significant Substation Communication Standardization Developments," was written in early 2000. It provides a complete introduction to IEC 61850, discusses the harmonization with UCA, provides terms and definitions, and remains a useful resource. Using the knowledge gained from numerous network designs, this paper focuses on the realities of actual implementation. Parts one through seven of the IEC 61850 standard deal with the abstract concepts of data groupings and naming conventions so that information is associated and described in the same fashion regardless of the vendor. When putting the abstract concepts of the standard on a physical network, as described in parts eight and nine, details emerge that need to be addressed. This paper identifies contemporary observations, documents several implementation lessons learned, and provides recommendations.