Integration of a New Standard: A Network Simulator of IEC 61850 Architectures for Electrical Substations

INTERNATIONAL ELECtrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61850 [1], the new standard for network communication in electrical substations, provides specific requirements that must be carefully evaluated. In this article, the authors will address, in particular, the interoperability of intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) and the end-to-end time of 4 ms for generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE) messages. Moreover, the configuration of the IEDs is more complicated with IEC 61850 and requires both electrical and network knowledge. Today, the integration of the IEC 61850 network architecture is a critical issue in electrical engineering since the network is used for protection functions such as intertripping. Thus, many studies have been done to evaluate the ways to facilitate IEC 61850 integration. This article presents a solution to this problem: the simulation of IEC 61850 network architectures. The essential objective is to simulate a complete IEC 61850 architecture and, at the same time, provide a real tool to validate the IEC 61850 requirements. In the design phase, this tool can serve to verify the GOOSE performance and optimize the network topology. It can also be a factory acceptance test (FAT) tool to validate the IED configuration.