The OPC UA IEC 61850 Companion Specification of the OPC Foundation is focusing on gateways that are intended to be used to transfer information fully and accurately through gateways between devices that implement IEC 61850 or OPC UA respectively.
While IEC 61850 is focusing on electricity generation, transmission, distribution, distributed energy resources (DER), and consumption, OPC UA is dealing with non-electrical industrial process activities. It is clear that users require integration of the electrical aspects of a plant with non-electrical aspects.
The information models defined in IEC 61850 were focused during the late 90s on protection and automation of electric power systems. In the meantime the models provide a huge number logical nodes (e.g., STMP = Supervision of temperature with measurement, alarms and trips, or FPID = PID loop control) applicable in most non-electrical applications domains. The communication services (Reporting, Logging, GOOSE, Control, Setting Group Control, ...) are generic for any application domain.
OPC UA’s modelling capabilities is understood to make it possible to transfer data between different systems without losing the semantics of data. Thus the drafted companion specification document describes how IEC 61850 data can exchanged using OPC UA data modelling and services.
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IEC TC 88 PT 25 is currently working on a technical specification:
Wind turbines - IEC 61400-25-41: Communications for monitoring and control of wind power plants - Mapping to communication profile based on IEC 62541 (OPC UA)
Microsoft has provided an Open-Source OPC UA stack to OPC Foundation!
The new OPC Foundation .NET reference stack, based on the new .NET Standard Library technology, was developed and optimized by Microsoft to serve as the complete platform-independent infrastructure, from the embedded world to the cloud. This new version is enabled on the following supported platforms: Various Linux distributions, iOS, Android, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Phone, HoloLens and the Azure cloud.
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Click HERE for accessing the open source reference stack at Gidhub.
Brief comparison of IEC 61850 and OPC UA:
Standard? Yes for both in IEC.
Available since? IEC 61850 for some 15 years; OPC UA for a few years.
SCADA support? Yes for both.
Real-time support? Yes in IEC 61850; OPC UA is intended to run on TSN (IEEE 802).
Security? Yes for both (IEC 61850 refers to IEC 62351).
Semantic? IEC 61850 has huge, still growing list of models; OPC UA has not yet semantics.
Configuration Language? IEC 61850 has SCL (System Configuration Language); OPC UA has no.
Conformance testing? Yes for both.
Support: By many big and small companies.
Open Source Stack? Yes for IEC 61850 (http://libiec61850.com); yes for OPC UA (from Microsoft, see above).
Standard? Yes for both in IEC.
Available since? IEC 61850 for some 15 years; OPC UA for a few years.
SCADA support? Yes for both.
Real-time support? Yes in IEC 61850; OPC UA is intended to run on TSN (IEEE 802).
Security? Yes for both (IEC 61850 refers to IEC 62351).
Semantic? IEC 61850 has huge, still growing list of models; OPC UA has not yet semantics.
Configuration Language? IEC 61850 has SCL (System Configuration Language); OPC UA has no.
Conformance testing? Yes for both.
Support: By many big and small companies.
Open Source Stack? Yes for IEC 61850 (http://libiec61850.com); yes for OPC UA (from Microsoft, see above).