Commissioning of IEC 61850 substation utilising new tools

IEC 61850 is a standard that is widely used for power utility communication utilizing GOOSE for real-time communication as well as client/server for SCADA communication. Factory acceptance testing (FAT) and site acceptance testing are described in the standard in a general manner. This presentation describes practical experiences when putting into operation substations according to IEC 61850. Since functional testing is described only briefly in the standard, the presentation focusses on that part of the testing. Starting with different use cases requirements for tools are defined. Testing interlocking and intertripping schemes with real-time communication (GOOSE) is analysed. To do so, special requirements for test sets as well as analysing software are discussed and compared with practical experiences. Putting into operation supervision, automation and control differs. Since client-server communication describes point-to-point traffic, new requirements for analysing devices are proposed. Analysing the communication as described in IEC 61850-8 is extended with the presentation of the abstract communication services and its interface (ACSI) as described in part 7 of the standard series. Requirements for switches (mirroring) or other approaches (TAP) are discussed. To substantiate the practical nature of this paper proposals for commissioning and tools for initial operation will be proposed. To distinguish between real and simulated signals, the standard in the second edition provides a huge amount of possibilities. This presentation provides a proposal of how to combine the possibilities in testing tools. An outlook is given describing communication with sampled values, as described in IEC 61850-9-2, and the combination with time synchronisation according to IEEE 1588 (PTP).