THE BENEFITS

IEC 61850 is the new communications standard that allows the development of a new range of protection and control applications that result in significant benefits compared to conventional hard wired solutions.

It supports interoperability between protective relays and control devices from different manufacturers in the substation which is a necessity in order to achieve substation level interlocking, protection and control functions and improve the efficiency of microprocessor based relays applications.

The modeling of IEC 61850 based multifunctional distance protective relays requires good understanding of their functional hierarchy, as well as the modeling principles defined in the standard.

Complex devices, such as transmission line protection relays are modeled as servers with multiple Logical Devices that correspond to typical substation functions, such as Protection, Measurements and Recording.

The model needs to properly represent the functional hierarchy of the protection relay and at the same time use the available model hierarchy defined in the standard.

High speed peer-to-peer communications between IEDs connected to the substation LAN based on exchange of GSE messages can successfully be used to replace hard-wiring for different protection and control applications such as the protection of distribution buses, distributed recording or load-shedding in substations with varying configuration.

Sampled Measured Values communicated from Merging Units to different protection and control devices connected to the substation Process bus replace the copper wiring between the instrument transformers in the substation yard and the IEDs.
Such systems provide some significant advantages over conventional protection and control systems used to perform the same functions in the substations:

• Reduced wiring, installation, maintenance and commissioning costs
• Easy adaptation to changing bus configuration in the substation

The Substation Configuration Language allows interoperability and a seamless integration process. The common substation or IED configuration files can be exchanged between different configuration, coordination, analysis or testing tools in a way that significantly improves the efficiency of the engineering process.