Minimizing the Impact of IEC 61850 in the New Automation Projects

This article describes the challenges that the use of IEC 61850 imposes to the different actors that take part in the different stages of the development of substation automation projects and how some of these challenges can be minimized using the appropriate tools. The use of IEC 61850 imposes a hierarchical information model with a data naming that need to be understood in order to accomplish the engineering process. Besides, the data exchange among the different IEDs in the system may be done either using a point to point client-server communication profile or a point to multipoint publisher-subscriber profile. These data exchanges are configured during the engineering stage providing the data needed by the different IEDs: protective relays, HMI (Human Machine Interfaces) or RTU (Remote Terminal Units). This article suggests the use of the descriptive information in the standard file format SCL (System description Configuration Language) to perform this task and explain how the tools can benefit of this feature.