Evaluation of Process Bus Reliability

IEC 61850 based substation automation systems are based on switched Ethernet, covering process, bay and station levels. Process bus refers to the communication infrastructure between process level and the bay, which replaces hundred miles of copper wirings from the switchyard to the control house whilst station bus eliminates the copper wirings within the control room. IEC 61850 based substation automation systems simplify the design, installation and maintenance with significantly reduced cost. This is an industrial revolution taking place in the power industry world wide. Its real-time, security and reliability are of concern and are vital important to the industry. This presentation describes the development and application of an established platform for evaluating process bus applications. The evaluation platform consists of a network architecture being evaluated. SMV generators, GOOSE simulators and TCP/IP traffic generation and impairment software are all connected to the network under test, as well as the devices forming the process bus applications. A test device, either an Omicron Test set or a RTDS simulator with GTNET cards, is used to conduct the testing and measure the performance of the devices and system under testing. An example of a given architecture for sampled values streams, as well as GOOSE messages over the network, is presented.