IEC61850 GOOSE performance in real time and challenges faced by power utilities

IEC61850 is widely accepted around the globe due to the significant benefits that it provides compared with conventional hard-wired solutions. In this paper, four different IEDs from three different vendors (ABB, Areva and SEL) namely: REF615, SEL487, SEL311 and P145, are used to model a bay level of IEC61850 substation. Then, using industry standard fault test simulator “CMC356 OMICRON”, different fault scenarios are examined by injecting faults into the system through both analogue input and GOOSE test message as a binary input to capture the differences. Finally, using IED Scout as a network traffic analyser, time performance of GOOSE messaging is examined to show the advantage of using GOOSE message in IEC61850. The authors will also address some of the challenges and issues that engineers deal with in modern substations when dealing with IEC61850 based devices.