IEC 61850 testing in edition 2 — A systematisation

Since IEC 61850 became the widely used standard for substation communication with a lot of implementations. Testing is an important issue. The standard in its current version covers some possibilities and approaches for testing in general and for measures of performance. Nevertheless some issues came out which needed to be clarified with the new edition of the standard. Edition 2 will be available in 2012 and offers much more possibilities and sophisticated details. Due to the huge amount of prospects and different places where testing can located and marked systematization might be helpful. Test bits, test quality, test indications, test mode and test behavior will be practically explained. Ongoing projects with the usage of Sampled Values and GOOSE raise other questions. Distinguishing between "real" and "simulated" signals is a requirement, the possibilities for that will be described in this paper as well. The standard tries to summarize all these issues in a quite complex table with additional remarks. The paper looks beyond this table and explains possible scenarios for testing client-server-communication for SCADA purposes as well as GOOSE and Sampled Values. Experiences in current implementations will be presented as well as an outlook on advanced concepts to be used in substations according to IEC 61850 Edition 2.