A flexible HiL testing platform for performance evaluation of IEC 61850-based protection schemes

This paper presents a flexible Hardware in the Loop (HiL) platform for testing and validation of protection schemes based on distributed intelligence provided by Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs). The IEDs communicate with one another in both peer-peer communication mode and in client-server mode for implementing the complete protection scheme. In particular the platform supports IEC 61850 Generic Object Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) for fast peer-peer communication and MMS protocol for client-server mode of communication. The platform incorporates Real Time Digital Simulator (RTDS) for real-time simulation of the power system contingencies and offers a plug&play provision for incorporating the IEDs that implement the protection schemes. It facilitates the flexible configuration of the IEDs and the data being exchanged among them either through GOOSE or through MMS. Furthermore the bus architecture proposed by the IEC 61850 standard is also incorporated within the platform. In this work as practical example, the complete setup of the platform for implementing a Distributed Fault Location Isolation and Service Restoration (D-FLISR) is described, wherein GOOSE communication service is used for the faster FLI part and MMS protocol is used for the SR part of the FLISR algorithm.