Saturday, September 10, 2016

How to get Interoperability and Interchangeability with IEC 61850?

The standardization process in the context of IEC 61850 is picking up quite fast. As you have learned in the posts of today and older ones, there are several new topics on the list of items to work on for future new parts of IEC 61850.
One of the crucial objectives is the interoperability and INTERCHANGEABILITY of devices from different vendors in a multi-vendor system.
To reach this goal, we need standards! Sure. But what is absolutely required is the EDUCATION of experts from Vendors, Utilities and System integrators.
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3 comments:

Rod Hughes said...

Interesting emphasis on the word "INTERCHANGEABILTY"
However the purpose of IEC 61850 is NOT that!
Refer IEC 61850-1 section 4 para 2..
Ed1 "Interchangeability is beyond this communication standard"
Ed2 with slightly more explanation: "Interchangeability would also require standardisation of functions which is beyond this communication standard"

THE sole purpose of IEC 61850 is to configure IEDs to communicate using a vendor-agnostic engineering process with vendor-independant semantics with vendor-agnostic communication protocols.
Yes, SOME of the configuration of the IEDs may well be facilitated by Part 6, 7, 8 and 9 but the configuration.
Unfortunately there are vendor-specific interpretations of those and indeed Edition 1 was somewhat confused in some of its description of how things worked e.g. IEC 61850 7-4 description of GGIO that has led to som,e "limitations of how to use the Standard!! However we have to be somewhat aggressive as users in weeding out incorrect use of GGIO (although I know some utilities think the opposite but are left wondering why engineering is so hard!!) https://ideology.atlassian.net/wiki/x/bQBv

... but there is a LOT more to interchangeability than just the signals being sent over the LAN - physical size, physical I/O, number and type of LAN ports,Device front panel facilities ...
So let's not create unrealistic expectations of complete interchangeability.

blog.iec61850 said...

Hi Rod, Sure the standard series IEC 61850 is a crucial building block to reach "interchangeability" - there are many issues to be negotiated to get there. I am aware of a big TSO that specifies interchangeability on top of IEC 61850. It takes some time ... but it is doable. Vendors involved are more flexible than year ago! There is hope that IEC 61850 can be used as a solid base to reach Interchangeability.

Karlheinz Schwarz said...

Hi Rod, Sure the standard series IEC 61850 is a crucial building block to reach "interchangeability" - there are many issues to be negotiated to get there. I am aware of a big TSO that specifies interchangeability on top of IEC 61850. It takes some time ... but it is doable. Vendors involved are more flexible than year ago! There is hope that IEC 61850 can be used as a solid base to reach Interchangeability.