Development of an IEC61850-Based DCU for AMI

Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) plays an important role in smart grids. Data Concentrator Unit (DCU), used to collect data from smart meters and transmit them to Meter Database Management System (MDMS) regularly, is the core component in AMI. If DCU can provide value-added functionalities, more efficient AMI management can be achieved. Therefore, this paper designs and develops IEC61850 as a value-added functionality for DCU to solve the communication consistency problem resulting from protocols of different vendors. A windowsbased Human-Machine Interface (HMI) for remote electricity supervisory system using Manufacturing Message Specification(MMS) is also implemented. The Linux-based HMI is used to acquire and monitor the collected data in the proposed IEC61850-based DCU. An experimental DCU platform is implemented to verify the correctness of IEC61850 realized in this paper. Besides, commercialized software is used to validate the communication consistency of IEC 61850 protocols implemented in the proposed DCU.