by Christoph Brunner, it4power, Switzerland
Typically, IEC standards have a base number for what typically is a series of standards – like in our case the number 61850.
When reading the title, you may have asked yourself the question what Edition 2025 is. Well – to explain, we first need to discuss the concept of editions with IEC standards. Typically, IEC standards have a base number for what typically is a series of standards – like in our case the number 61850.
An IEC publication itself is an individual document, like for example IEC 61850-7-4. IEC differentiates between four types of documents:
- International standards (IS)
- Technical specifications (TS)
- Technical reports (TR) and
- Publicly available specifications (PAS)
For IEC 61850, we use all four variants.
An IS or a TS are documents that can state requirements. A technical specification has shorter lifetime and may be used for topics that are not necessarily ready for an international standard.
A TR is a document that does not provide requirements or recommendations but may provide additional information supporting IS documents. For IEC 61850, we used in the past TRs for documents describing required extensions to the standard for new areas of application. As those included requirements, we cannot use a TR anymore, that is why recently we started to use PAS for that.
A PAS can be a preliminary document, published prior to the development of a standard.
The lifetime of an IEC document is typically defined by the stability date. Once that date has expired, the document can be reconfirmed to be still valid, it can be revised, or it can be withdrawn. When the document is revised, that typically results in a new edition. For limited changes, it is also possible to do an amendment. This versioning is strictly done by document and document type. That means, we cannot really talk about Edition 2 of IEC 61850 as individual parts may undergo different revision cycles. Also, if a number of changes or if the type changes, the edition numbering will restart at 1.
Taking examples from IEC 61850, we had published with TR IEC 61850-7-5 modeling guidelines. Those provide recommendations, which cannot be any more in a technical report. For the planned revision of that part 7-5, we will therefore change to a TS – as this is a new document type, it will be TS IEC 61850-7-5, Ed 1, and not Edition 2.
Another example is part 6. As we introduced a part 6-1 for the HMI configuration, we decided to rename part 6 to part 6-1. This is considered a new document, so the next version will not be Edition 3, it will be IEC 61850-6-1, Edition 1.
When you look at the way we identify namespaces and code components, we use a year for the version (which corresponds to an Edition of a publication), a letter starting with A for revisions (which corresponds to Amendments) and a number for releases (which corresponds to TISSUE fixes).
So that is why WG10 decided to rather talk in the future about an edition with the year the namespace will have, instead of a number that may restart and may be different per part.
Now what will Edition 2025 be? Edition 2025 will revise the parts defining LN Models and the part 6.
With regards to the LN Models, a need to split the documents in smaller parts to be more agile and responsive to required extensions has been identified. The approach shall also make conformance testing more responsive to changes. Instead of having one large part 7-4, we will split the content into smaller parts.
As an example, the part 7-4 will contain the core abstract LN classes and the LNs of the Group L (e.g. LLN0). A new part 7-40 will contain common LNs like GGIO or MMXU.
A new part 7-400 will contain LNs of the group C and A related to substation automation; 7-401 will contain everything related to protection (P- and R-Node).
For Edition 2025, there will be no changes to the models themselves – the only change Is the way they are represented.
For part 6, as part of the work to define OCL rules for verification of SCL files, a UML model of SCL was created.
The next step is, to create the schema file automatically from the UML model. That schema file may not be identical to the current one from a textual perspective, but semantically, it will be the same. Edition 2025 of the part 6 will publish that new schema.
Biography:

Christoph Brunner is the President of his own independent consulting company it4power LLC based in Switzerland. He has over 40 years of experience with knowledge across several areas within the Utility Industry and of technologies from the Automation Industry. He has worked as a project manager at ABB Switzerland Ltd in the area of Power Technology Products in Zurich / Switzerland where he was responsible for the process close communication architecture of the automation system. He is Convener of WG 10 of the IEC TC57 and is a member of WG 17, 18 and 19 of IEC TC 57. He is member of IEEE-PES and IEEE-SA. He is an IEEE Fellow and is active in several working groups of the IEEE-PSRC and a member of the PSRC main committee and the subcommittee H. He is advisor to the board of the UCA international users’ group.