The IEC 61850 in the Portuguese distribution substations: Contemporary challenges and possible solutions

Abstract

Interoperability may be defined as the ability ofintelligent electronic devices (IED's) to exchange and useinformation correctly. Although the IEC 61850 standardsdefine a consistent methodology for interconnecting IEDsin substation using LAN based technologies to promoteinteroperability, this ability to exchange informationcorrectly is not always achieved between different IED'sfrom different manufactures. This paper reports theassessment of IED's, featured with IEC 61850 standardsand connected to the same communication network fromdifferent manufactures. Different interoperability testsare performed and the difficulty and challenges toexchange and receive information is also reported.Possible solutions on the XML schema to generate acompliant SCL file as well as the way to scale up thestandardization of the substation project is also exploredand discussed in this paper.