A metamodeling approach to unifying IEC 61850 and IEC 61970

A smart grid is an electrical power grid infrastructure for improved efficiency, reliability, and safety based on automated monitoring and control of data and communication. IEC 61850 and IEC 61970 are core standards in the smart grid domain for substation automation and power operation management. Significant data exchange is involved between the IEC 61850 level and the IEC 61970 level. However, due to different perspectives on smart grid and independent evolution, IEC 61850 and IEC 61970 are not compatible. This forces practitioners to come up with their own data mappings between the standards in an ad-hoc manner, which leads to significant issues on interoperability and data consistency. An effective solution for this is to define a common semantic model for both substation automation and operation management. In this paper, we present a metamodeling approach for unifying IEC 61850 and IEC 61970 to provide a common semantic model and demonstrate the approach using a power transformer example.