Functional testing of IEC 61850 based IEDs and systems

The integration of multifunctional intelligent electronic devices in complex substation or power plant automation systems requires the development of a standard protocol that will meet the requirements of protection, control, monitoring, recording and metering functions. The emerging IEC 61850 standard for communication networks and systems in substations allows the development of high-speed peer-to-peer communications based applications, as well as distributed metering, control and protection solutions based on sampled analog values. The paper describes in detail the principles of different IEC 61850 communications based functions in multifunctional IEDs and analyses the factors that will affect their performance. It also discusses the requirements and principles of their testing. A comparison between the functional testing of conventional IEDs and testing of communications based IEDs are described later in the paper. Methods for functional testing of IEC 61850-based systems are presented at the end of the paper.