IMPLEMENTATION OF IEC-61850 COMPLIANT SYSTEM FOR PROTECTION, CONTROL AND MONITORING OF SUBSTATION

Abstract

Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) form the backbone of intelligent applications in substation automation (SA). With the advent of powerful microprocessor embedded inside these devices, whose computational power has made complex computationally intense decision making in a power system process a possibility. Interoperability between IEDs of different vendors for SA was hither to a difficult task as it necessitated the use of protocol converter gateways, thereby making the system more complex. To take care of this problem, the International Electrotechnical Commission(IEC) released a global standard IEC 61850 — "Communication networks and systems in substation" in the year 2005 with the goal of achieving interoperability between IEDs. IEC 61850 standardizes interface for networking these IEDs for Real Time monitoring, control and protection of substation. The abstract services defined by the standard provides a suitable platform for implementing applications related to power system processes irrespective of the underlying IEDs and networking protocols. This dissertation report presents an implementation of certain monitoring, control and protection services based on IEC 61850. The proposed solution to carry out this objective is to build a framework based on IEC 61850 information model, interfaces for communication (ASCI) and then build a basic system to demonstrate the application. The system is built on two different hardware platforms with different operating systems to demonstrate and verify interoperability. ARM processor based development board with suitable compiler for C++ codes along with suitable real time operating system and a PC running on open source operating system are used to emulate the IEDs. Application model is built on a framework consisting of logical nodes (LN) as defined by IEC 61850 part 7-4, thereby achieving virtualization. By using the modeling approach of IEC 61850 part 7-1, this framework can be further extended to develop various applications in substation automation.