Design of a Backup IED for IEC 61850-Based Substation

The IEC 61850-based substation automation system (SAS) provides opportunities for a new level of substation operation, enhancing operating efficiency and protection reliability with a new environment based on an Ethernet-based communication network and high-performance intelligent electronic devices (IEDs). With these changes, importance and dependence on IEDs are increasing rapidly in IEC 61850-based substations. While consideration of protection device faults has so far been infrequent, IED faults will become increasingly important in the future. Thus, this paper proposes a design of a backup IED for protection IED faults in IEC 61850-based substations. The proposed backup IED can be remotely converted into any type of protection IED without IED exchange, firmware update, or field control. The backup IED was designed through SCL engineering and file transfer functions in IEC 61850 and implemented by Windows programming with a commercially available IEC 61850 library.