An open platform for rapid-prototyping protection and control schemes with IEC 61850

Communications is becoming increasingly important to the operation of protection and control schemes. Although offering many benefits, using standards-based communications, particularly IEC 61850, in the course of the research and development of novel schemes can be complex. This paper describes an open source platform which enables the rapid-prototyping of communications-enhanced schemes. The platform automatically generates the data model and communications code required for an Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) to implement publisher-subscriber Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) and Sampled Value (SV) messaging. The generated code is tailored to a particular System Configuration Description (SCD) file, and is therefore extremely efficient at run-time. It is shown how a model-centric tool, such as the open source Eclipse Modeling Framework, can be used to manage the complexity of the IEC 61850 standard, by providing a framework for validating SCD files and by automating parts of the code generation process.