Evaluation of Time-Critical Communications for IEC 61850-Substation Network Architecture

Present-day developments, in electrical power transmission and distribution, require considerations of the status quo. In other meaning, international regulations enforce increasing of reliability and reducing of environment impact, correspondingly they motivate developing of dependable systems. Power grids especially intelligent (smart grids) ones become industrial solutions that follow standardized development. The International standardization, in the field of power transmission and distribution, improve technology influences. The rise of dedicated standards for SAS (Substation Automation Systems) communications, such as the leading International Electro-technical Commission standard IEC 61850, enforces modern technological trends in this field. Within this standard, a constraint of low ETE (End-to-End) latency should be respected, and time-critical status transmission must be achieved. This experimental study emphasis on IEC 61850 SAS communication standard, e.g. IEC 61850 GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Events), to implement an investigational method to determine the protection communication delay. This method observes GOOSE behaviour by adopting monitoring and analysis capabilities. It is observed by using network test equipment, i.e. SPAN (Switch Port Analyser) and TAP (Test Access Point) devices, with on-the-shelf available hardware and software solutions

Dependability Optimization of Process-level Protection in an IEC-61850-Based Substation

International audiencePower substations are intensively renovated toward using information and communication technologies such as object oriented modeling and Ethernet networks. In the last two decades, Substation automation systems used capabilities of network communication services adopted from sophisticated international standardization such as IEC 61850. Distributed safety related functions take advantage of these technologies to protect the process-level equipment. Substation devices such as intelligent electronic devices, measurement units and circuit breaker controllers, with new capabilities, i.e. enabling IEC 61850, are integrated to build the protection and control functions that form the safety-related system. The objective of this research is to evaluate quantitatively the dependability for transformer protection architectures in the bay level.Safety integrity levels model, described in both IEC 62061 and IEC 61508, gives measurements for safety integrity levels according to the probability of failure. The determination of these levels is an approach to estimate system dependability