'POWER-ASSISTED' CONFIGURATION USING IEC 61850: PART 6

摘要

One of the main forces that drove the development of the IEC 61850 protocol suite was the high cost and complexity, and the resulting quality and schedule risk, of integrating today's substation automation systems. The sheer effort of configuring and managing tens of thousands of data points is labor-intensive and error-prone. IEC 61850 attempts to address this fundamental problem by incorporating: Structured data, capturing relationships between data that are traditionally lost; Human-readable names, describing the function of each point; Standardized functional object models agreed upon by industry stakeholders; Self-Description, in which a device reports online what data it has available; A common Substation Configuration Language (SCL) file format for exchanging data between engineering tools. This paper describes the challenges faced and met while deploying all these capabilities in a real automation system, and especially while making use of the IEC 61850 Part 6 Substation Configuration Language. It examines the advantages and drawbacks of using either SCL or self-description alone, and then describes how they were used together to provide greater benefit. This style of configuration can be described as "Power-Assisted," as opposed to "Plug and Play." Although it is still not possible (or desirable) to simply connect and run a power system device as if it were the printer on a personal computer, this paper illustrates that the use of IEC 61850 features can make the process much shorter and its results much higher in quality. Tests showed that configuring a client to talk to a single device could be reduced from as much as a day, to about an hour.