IEC 61850: THE crucial standard for Power Delivery System at EDF

PennWell Corporation reported earlier this year:
French utility giant EDF uses IEC 61850 for more than the standard's usual communication applications. Working with Schneider Electric, EDF has embraced a new approach for application modeling with IEC 61850 at its core.

For designing wind farms and photovoltaic (PV) systems, EDF employs this approach as early as the requirements-gathering level. The approach echoes one encouraged by Schneider Electric for using IEC 61850, an ambition the company translated into software engineering tools.

With its new approach to engineering smart substation automation systems, EDF places information flow at the center of project engineering. …

Any person or machine at EDF can read and understand that common language. The language enables information exchange among devices, people, departments, organizations, generations of stakeholders and the components and people involved in projects and systems.

… EDF's approach, based completely on the IEC 61850 standard, allows the capture of unambiguous requirements in a formal way.

Click HERE to read the full article.

More to come.

IEC 61850 Edition 1, 2, or 3 and UML modeling?

Several parts of IEC 61850 have been improved through a maintenance process for the recent years. New features have been added the recent years. But what are the differences?

NettedAutomation has analyzed the differences between Edition 1 and 2 of various parts in detail. Many experts all over have asked for a detailed analysis, presentation and discussion of the differences. The result is a new comprehensive module of the seminars (covers one or two days – depending on the needs). A few slides from the new module are shown below.

One of the crucial issues is that a specific part Edition 1 has been improved from day 1 of its publication by the tissue process. Additional features have been added.

http://tissue.iec61850.com

As of today we have parts with the old title and tag “Edition" 1”, with the new title and tag “Edition 1” and several parts with the new title and tag “Edition 2”:

A list of all published IEC 61850 parts can be found here.

As the slide exposes: There will never be an Edition 2 of the standard series IEC 61850 … some time down the road we will have parts tagged Ed1, Ed2, Ed3, Edx, …

In addition to the maintenance process, WG 10 has (after some 14 years) converted the models in IEC 61850 to UML. The UML is intended to serve as a development and maintenance tool in the future standardization process. The following picture exposes the two notations: table (left) and UML (right).

During the Editors’ meeting in Ann Arbor (December 1998) we discussed the use of UML before we published any information model !! It was a long way from first “ideas” and today’s UML model – as you can see.

 

The various parts tagged Edition 2 and the new UML models are presented and discussed during special training courses. The basics are also covered in the public seminars.

Emerson Process Management applies IEC 61850 for power plants

Emerson Process Management announced on March 26, 2009, that it will use IEC 61850 in power plants to be build for EDF in France and UK.

"Emerson’s PlantWeb architecture will make extensive use of HART Communications to connect the I/O. IEC 61850 modules will interface to Intelligent Electronic Devices (IED) used within the switchyard."

Full press release.