A design of Database Configurator for IEC 61850 client

Major features of IEC 61850 include SCL-based engineering, uniform data model and communication-based information transfer. Owing to XML-based characteristics of SCL, a substation engineering can be done easily with programming. There are four kinds of information file in the SCL-based engineering - SSD (System Specification Description), ICD (IED Capability Description), CID (Configured IED Description) and SCD (Substation Configuration Description). The SCD file has all information about substation configuration. From SCD file, data or information of interest can be easily extracted using SCL parser and they can be stored in the database automatically. This paper reports the development of a DB configurator that creates a database referring to LNs, CDCs specified in IEC 61850 and analysis of the SCD file. DB Configurator stores information in the SCD file into database automatically by creating basic data tables combined with SCL, LN, CDC specified in IEC 61850. The developed DB configurator saves a lot of time and efforts in constructing a database for substation-related jobs like maintenance, operation, control, etc., which used to be performed by engineers by hand.