IEC 61850: What You Need to Know About Functionality and Practical Implementation

This paper deals with the functionality and practical implementation of IEC 61850 .The utility users and manufacturers recognize the desire and the need to merge the communications capabilities of all IEDs in a substation, or even across the entire power network. Multiple IEDs can share data or control commands at high speed to perform new distributed protection, control, and automation functions. This sort of cooperative control operation has the potential to supersede and eliminate much of the dedicated control wiring in a substation, as well as costly special-purpose communications channels between the stations and around the power network. IEC 61850 was created to be an internationally standardized method of communications and integration with goals of supporting systems built from multi-vendor IEDs networked together to perform protection, monitoring, automation, metering, and control. This paper identifies contemporary observations, several implementation lessons learned, and provides recommendations