IEC 61850 Integration Into Beckhoff PLC

Beckhoff - a well known German PLC manufacturer - successfully offers IEC 61850 modelling, configuration, and information exchange for IEC 61850 and IEC 61400-25. 

Excerpt from their website ... worth to read:

"Application example: 

In this case, the use of IEC 61400-25 [mapping according to IEC 61400-25-4 IEC 61850-8-1, MMS] enables all wind turbines from different manufacturers in a wind farm to communicate with a central station.

Standardization avoids the use of vendor-specific protocols, which would lead to increased application expenditure. BECKHOFF supports this method with the implementation of IEC 61850 or IEC 61400-25 respectively in the TwinCAT Automation suite."

Beckhoff has a very nice and easy to read (and understand) online documentation.

Click HERE (English) and HERE (Deutsch) to find the details of the implementation of Client, Server, GOOSE Publisher and Subscriber.

Just give it a try.

Are IEC 61850 based Systems Cyber-Secure?

Often you hear arguments that IEC 61850 based systems are not cyber-secure ... is that true?

The truth is: The standards series IEC 61850 refers to the standard series IEC 62351. Example:

Power Systems Management and Associated Information Exchange – Communication network and system security – Part 4: Profiles including MMS and derivatives

IEC 61850-8-1 (Mapping to MMS) requires to use TLS ... as defined in IEC 62351-6 !!

Click HERE to access the preview of IEC 61850-8-1 (referring to IEC 62351) and HERE for the preview of IEC 62351-6.

Another issue to protect your IEC 61850 based system is to monitor the traffic and compare it with the configured communication relations and contents:

Click HERE to watch a brief video from Omicron that shows some means to support cyber-security in IEC 61850 based systems. 

There is a lot of activities going on to increase the cyber-security in automation systems.

New Book on IEC 61850

Please note that there is a quite new book (400+ pages) about IEC 61850 for electric power systems:

IEC 61850 Principles and Applications to Electric Power Systems

Editors: Peter Bishop, Nirmal-Kumar C. Nair

Click HERE for details.

The basic approach of the IEC 61850 standard series is to some degree independent of electric power systems and applicable in most automation domains.

Example: Monitoring of a process measurement

The following sketch shows an excerpt of a series of presentations I conducted recently.

A instantaneous measurement (in IEC 61850 xxxx.instMag) can be read at any time by some computer (on the left). The value could come with a quality information saying: Value is ok; and a timestamp.

Instead of polling the value, you may want to receive the value every 10 seconds automatically without polling. Next you may want to receive the value when it changes by +/- 10 % compared to the last reported value. Or you may want to receive a report in case the quality of the value changes from good to bad ... and so on.

IEC 61850 information exchange services for monitoring process values offer many additional possibilities to receive spontaneously sent information. The information to be sent can represent measurements you find in building automation, heating systems, diesel generators, pressure systems, car manufactoriing, ...

Click HERE for papers co-written by Nirmal-Kumar C. Nair (co-author of the new book) and myself (Karlheinz Schwarz). You will be surprised what we published more than 10 years ago! (some papers may not easily be accessible! ... sorry for that).

Stay tuned to the blog to see more on this in the future. 

IEC 61850: Communication Interfaces for Mobile Battery Energy Storage Applications

A. Bonetti ... NO, NOT Andrea Bonetti, but his son Alessandro wrote a very remarkable Master Thesis at KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) (Stockholm, Sweden):

Communication Interfaces for Mobile Battery Energy Storage Applications

Alessandro, Congratulation! Excellent!

You wrote: "Then, I give my sincere appreciation to Karlheinz Schwarz for answering my questions regarding modeling, and maintaining an open blog with comments and thoughts regarding power system automation."

You are welcome!

Excerpt from the Abstract:

"This thesis project, carried out at Northvolt Systems, aims to analyze the existing and readily used communication interfaces for a specific set of mobileBESS applications. The analysis is performed by a literature review of typical mobile BESS applications with the identified corresponding communication interfaces. Among the identified interfaces is the IEC 61850 standard, which shows suitability in smart grid applications, enabling interoperability,vendor-independence, and standardization. To provide a real-life analysis of the IEC 61850 benefits and applicability to mobile BESS, an integration of the standard to a Northvolt mobile BESS was performed."

Click HERE to access the abstract and the download link.

Click HERE to watch a nice video from Andrea Bonetti about IEC 61850 for power systems.

Andrea, You could be proud of your son Alessandro!