One of the most crucial issues in the management of energy systems is: HOW TO share or exchange useful information generated by a myriad of sensors and applications needed by hundreds of applications?
Lets assume that lakes of information are generated every second. Usually this information is stored in silos of vendors specific solutions and communicated using one or more vendor specific communication solutions ... as shown in the following sketch drawn by our grandson Jan Oliver:
The expectations to apply IEC 61850 are high! BUT quite often vendors argue, that it is easier to use their private solutions - faster and saves time and costs! This may be true for the first phase of a project - but in the long run and in the view of the life time cost it may be completely opposite.
Three experts from Vattenfall DSO (Sweden; Vincent GLINIEWICZ, David EROL Anders JOHNSSON) have reported at the CIRED conference 2019-06 in Madrid (Spain) from an implementation of a pilot project using IEC 61850 and CIM with the title:
LEVERAGING INDUSTRY STANDARDS TO BUILD AN ARCHITECTURE FOR ASSET MANAGEMENT AND PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE
Excerpt from the paper:
"... However the
data unfortunately currently often remain unused and unshared outside of the substation or specific silos for various reasons, some technical (e.g. cyber security, system incompatibility), some and organizational (e.g. vendor lock-in, siloed applications and organizations).
Additionally, with an increasing number of use cases requiring access to information, there is a growing number of information flows needed not only between data sources and central level applications but also between these central level applications. Without an IT architecture that allows reuse of information flows, there are
legitimate concerns that the opportunities that digitalization promises might be delayed and costly or even worse, not be achievable.
As a result, Vattenfall Eldistribution sees a
standard based integration approach as a cost-effective approach that seems to offer in the long run low integration costs and more importantly a greater flexibility,
going from supplier specific integrations to a more generic approach. ...
We would also like to highlight some of the
deviations from the standards that were observed during this pilot:
The
pilot made use of a REST API towards the real time data historian (RTDH in fig. 2), although there was no mention of REST in the 61968-100 standard. One could however expect, given the increasing popularity and use of RESTful services in most industries, that the standard will soon follow and that the mention will be added in a further edition on the standard.
The gateway used in the pilot was a prototype base on a technical report (IEC TR 61850-90-2)
[Using IEC 61850 for communication between substations and control centres] which is not yet a standard. This might explain why there doesn’t seem yet to be a complete and robust 61850-90-2 compliant product on offer in the market.
Another alternative considered for the pilot gateway was the use of IEC 61850/MMS towards the substation and the use of web services (either RESTful+ JSON or SOAP) to communicate northbound instead of the IEC 61850/MMS used in the pilot. SOA has indeed a robust and well developed architecture for distributed computing, and this should be leveraged. There however did not seem to be any products available on the market. This alternative will be explored in a coming pilot. ..."
The paper concludes:
"Although the pilot was made for a primary substation, the widespread use of the
IEC 61850 standards series make the results of this pilot not only applicable for primary substations,
but potentially also secondary substations and microgrid.
Following the successful pilot, the next step is to look at how to fully implement and verify the concepts in a real substation and to secure production grade components where prototypes have been used as well as test the architecture through other smart grid use cases."
Click
HERE for the full paper.
I have run an UCA/IEC 61850 pilot project with Anders Johnsson some 20 years (!) ago:
Two reports out of this pilot project and other discussions have been published in 2002:
Wind Power Communication
Verification report and recommendation
Click
HERE for the Report.
Wind Power Communication - Design & Implementation
of Test Environment for IEC61850/UCA2
Click
HERE for the Report.
Enjoy the reports.
By the way: It took some 20 years to understand that the mapping of IEC 61850 models and communication protocols to MMS (ISO 9506) should be extended by a much easier and simpler mapping to JSON and, e.g., MQTT or http ...
It is not too late for such an additional standardized mapping ... e.g., as IEC 61850-8-3.
It may take another 10 years before this becomes true! Hope it will happen a bit earlier!
Further reading on the subject see discussion of IEC 61850-8-1 versus 8-2 (by 2024-02-25: 4074 visits of the post since July 2019).
Other people have
similar ideas and published the following paper:
International Electronical Committee (IEC) 61850
Mapping with Constrained Application Protocol
(CoAP) in Smart Grids Based European
Telecommunications Standard Institute
Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Environment
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