A network simulator for IEC61850 architecture

IEC61850, the new standard for network communication in electrical substations, provides specific requirements which have to be carefully evaluated. In this paper, the authors will address in particular the interoperability of Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) and the End-To-End time of 4ms for GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event) messages. Moreover, the configuration of the IEDs is more complicated with IEC61850 and requires both electrical and network knowledge. Nowadays, the integration of IEC61850 network architecture is the real critical issue in electrical engineering since the network is used for protection functions such as intertripping. Thus, many studies had been done in order to evaluate the ways to facilitate IEC61850 integration. This paper presents a solution to this problem: the simulation of IEC61850 network architectures. The essential objective is to simulate a complete IEC61850 architecture and, at the same time, to provide a real tool to validate IEC61850 requirements. In design phase, this tool can serve to verify the GOOSE performance and optimize the network topology. It can also be a FAT tool to validate the IED configuration.