Design of experiment platform for digital substation based on IEC 61850

The advent of the era of smart grid promotes the upgrading of substation automation technology. The testing in substation changes from the traditional hard contact (relay check) to “soft touch” (network message detection). This paper builds an experiment platform for digital substation based on IEC 61850 in order to integrate the cutting-edge technology of IEC 61850 substation automation into the university's experiment teaching. In the experiment platform MMS and GOOSE communication between the substation IEDs are simulated by means of IEDScout and libiec61850 software, and the resulting packets are captured and analyzed by Wireshark. This paper further introduces the application of platform in detail. Practice results show that the experiment platform proposed in this paper is realized with small difficulty and low cost, avoids the complicated development process, and the operation process of experiment platform is simple and intuitive, easy to get started, and enables students grasp new technology of substation automation based IEC 61850 more vividly and directly.