scope:

General

This part of IEC 61850, which is a Technical Report, is intended for an audience familiar with network communication and/or IEC 61850-based systems and particularly for substation protection and control equipment vendors, network equipment vendors and system integrators.

This document focuses on engineering a local area network limited to the requirements of IEC 61850-based substation automation. It outlines the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to network topology, redundancy, clock synchronization, etc. so that the network designer can make educated decisions. In addition, this document outlines possible improvements to both substation automation and networking equipment.

This document addresses data transfer over the network in IEC 61850, such as transmitting tripping commands for protection via GOOSE messages, and in particular the multicast data transfer of large volumes of sampled values (SV) from merging units (MUs).

This document considers seamless redundancy to increase the network availability under failure conditions and the high precision clock synchronization that is central to the process bus and synchrophasor operation.

This document is not intended as a tutorial on networking or on IEC 61850. Rather, it references and summarizes standards and publications to assist the engineers. Many publications discuss the Ethernet technology but do not address the networks in terms of substation automation. Therefore, many technologies and options have been ignored since they were not considered relevant for a future-proof substation automation network design.

This document does not address network-based security, which is the subject of IEC 62351 and IEC 62443.

This document does not address technologies for wide area networks; these are covered by IEC TR 61850-90-12. Guidelines for communication outside of the substation that uses exclusively the routable Internet Protocol have been published, especially in documents IEC TR 61850-90-1 (substation to substation), IEC TR 61850-90-2 (substation to control center) and IEC TR 61850-90-5 (synchrophasor transmission). However, data flows used in substation-to-substation communication, or substation-to-control centre communication such as R-GOOSE and R-SV are covered when they transit over Ethernet links within the substation.

This document does not dispense the responsible system integrator from an analysis of the actual application configuration, which is the base for a dependable system.

Namespace name and version

This subclause is mandatory for any IEC 61850 namespace (as defined by IEC 61850-7-1:2011).

Code Component distribution

The Code Components are in light and full version:

The full version is named:

• IEC_TR_61850-90-4.NSD.2018A.Full. It contains definition of the whole data model defined in this document with the documentation associated and access is restricted to purchaser of this part

The light version is named:

• IEC_TR_61850-90-4.NSD.2018A.Light. It does not contain any documentations but contains the whole data model as per full version, and this light version is freely accessible on the IEC website for download, but the usage remains under the licensing conditions

The Code Components for IEC 61850 data models are formated in compliance with the NSD format defined by the standard IEC 61850-7-7. Each Code Component is a ZIP package containing:

• the electronic representation of the Code Component itself (possibly multiple files)

• the grammar files (XSD) enabling to check the consistency of the associated files against the defined version of NSD, but as well against the IEC 61850 flexibility rules in case of private extension

• a file describing the content of the package (IECManifest.xml)

The IECManifest contains different sections giving information on:

• The copyright notice

• The identification of the code component

• The publication related to the code component

• The list of the electronic files which compose the code component

• An optional list of history files to track changes during the evolution process of the code component

The life cycle of a code component is not restricted to the life cycle of the related publication. The publication life cycle goes through two stages, Version (corresponding to an edition) and Revision (corresponding to an amendment). A third publication stage (Release) allows publication of Code Component in case of urgent fixes of InterOp Tissues, thus without need to publish an amendment.

Consequently new release(s) of the Code Component may be released, which supersede(s) the previous release, and will be distributed through the IEC TC57 web site

The latest version/release of the document will be found by selecting the file named IEC_TR_61850-90-4.NSD.{VersionStateInfo} .Light with the filed VersionStateInfo of the highest value.