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 advantages introduced by GOOSE, it also brings challenges to protection and control engineers. Massive content of IEC 61580 standard, new technologies IEC 61850 implemented and slow adoption are main reasons for lacking of troubleshooting guideline. Special design of GOOSE in IEC 61850 makes troubleshooting more difficult. 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 approach for troubleshooting GOOSE communication issues. A new criteria Average Commission Time (ACT) is used to measure the average time and cost for system commission of each relay. This approach has been adopted in system integration for the past three years. System commissioning time measured (ACT) was improved by 75%. System integration and commissioning cost have been dramatically saved.