A practical guide of troubleshooting IEC 61850 GOOSE communication

IEC 61850 GOOSE (Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event) communication has been implemented in many substation automation applications, such as automatic transfer scheme, bus protection and power management system. With many advantages introduced by GOOSE, it also brings challenges to protection and control engineers. IEC 61850 standard comprises advanced communication and computer science technology with which protection and control engineers are not familiar. This paper examines GOOSE configuration, message structure, parameters, and actual communication capture in detail, analyses different fault situations in real world, evaluates communication diagnostic features, and provides a systematic troubleshooting path for troubleshooting GOOSE communication issues. This approach has been adopted in system integration for the past two years. System communication commissioning time was improved by 75%.