Thursday, March 8, 2012

IEC 61850 Gateway And Programmable IED

These days many vendors that have to develop devices for the electric power delivery are interested in applying a third-party Gateway that map the commonly used protocols like DNP3, Modbus, IEC 60870-5-10x, or CAN bus to an IEC 61850 Server. There are ready-to-go gateway available.

Usually the gateways map between one other protocol and an IEC 61850 Server – if you want to have two or three protocols to be mapped to IEC 61850 you likely have to pay a license for each protocol. The gateways usually are just gateways and do not allow any other application running on the same platform providing application data through IEC 61850 models and services.

The Gateway provided by SystemCorp is quite different as the following figure depicts:

WebCANDB

In addition to the Gateway functionality any other application programmed on the very same platform can provide data exchange with the IEC 61850 server through the simple API of the IEC 61850 stack. Various embedded controllers like the Beck IPC Chip provide these possibilities.

This allows with one IEC 61850 license to implement gateway functionalities AND let any other application functionality “speak” IEC 61850.

Access the description of the IEC 61850 Protocol Stack Online API Manual.

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