UCAIug had a Face-to-Face Interoperability Test September 12th through the 20th iat the Birnmingham-Jeferson Convention Center located in Birmingham, Alabama. Many thanks to Southern Company who provided the hosting and logistic support for the event.
The IOP consumed approximately 10,000 f2 (~929 m2), providing space for 130 individuals, 86 devices or applications, and 3 different networks integrated through a simulated Wide Area Network (WAN) to a control center network. The 3 different substation networks were utilized to perform parallel functional testing of Basic Application Profiles developed for the IOP testing.

The participants and witnesses of the IOP are told that the objective of an IOP is to fail so that standards, implementations, and understanding of IEC 61850 can be improved. Thus, the 120+ issues detected is an indication that the IOP was successful.
Most of the issues detected revolved around SCL and these were found by new Object Constraint Language (OCL) rules that are being developed by IEC TC57 WG10 which provides more detailed validation of SCL than XSD validation. The IOP also identified additional OCL rules that should be added. The primary OCL engine can be found at: https://riseclipse.github.io/.
One issue encountered was an Ethernet network configuration issue revolving around the frame size allowed by switches (typically 1522). However, this was too small for some of the infrastructure at the IOP and caused Ethernet fragment and communication loss.
However, ISO/IEC/IEEE 8802-3:2021 recommends 2000 octets when using PRP/HSR and VLAN encapsulation.
The issues are still being triaged and the final IOP report will be available to all UCAIug members.
Some worthwhile developments of note:
- A second network vendor demonstrated the ability to use SCL to “auto-configure” an IEC 61850 network (e.g. switched, etc.). As more vendors embrace this ability, there is the potential for cost savings using this technique
- The first multi-vendor interoperability of secure Routable GOOSE was achieved including the distribution of keys and policies for security
- Testing of other security mechanisms was also performed including structured syslog, radius using IEC 62351-8 roles, and PKI integration using SCEP
For further information, please contact Herbert Falk (UCAIug VP of Testing) at herb@ucaiug.org.