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With rapid development of the power grid construction and the new energy, power grid operating characteristic has major changes. The intelligent alarm processing function in the existing dispatching automation system cannot meet the requirements of the power grid operation. Distributed application has become a new application requirement for power grid dispatching automation system. In recent years, the distributed application research on distributed state estimation, distributed intelligent alarm, and distributed SCADA has been reported. Base on the status and application of the intelligent power network dispatch and control system, the intelligent alarm function analyzes the difference between the traditional alarm system and the distributed intelligent alarm system. And the paper studies the architecture and specification of the two-level distributed intelligent alarm system and analyzes the value and its future application prospect of distributed intelligent alarm for dispatching operation.

In engineering due to its frequent update, the SCL configuration file has too many versions and its management is chaotic. So the management of SCL files should be strengthened, and the content difference detection of SCL files should be carried out regularly. Due to the lack of full-featured configuration file comparison tools currently, this article describes how to develop new software based on MSXML4.0 parser tool. The XML file parsing and storage module, linked list creation and memory release module, and file content comparison module are introduced in detail. The application shows that the software can effectively reduce the workload of SCL file content difference detection and can improve the efficiency of the detection work.

Within this very chapter, we are going to provide a short overview on the large amount of applications and technologies involved with the IEC 61850 standard family. Starting with its origins, developed parts, and sub-parts, we will later focus on the information and communication side of this standard family and current developments in information modeling that lead to changes in how to apply the standard family. The focus of this chapter is the application of IEC 61850 in the scope of substation automation and Distributed Energy Resources and differences between those two major use cases.

In this chapter, the OPC Unified Architecture is introduced as a future key technology for realizing a variety of Smart Grid applications addressing automation and control. OPC UA is the successor of the established Classic OPC specifications and state of the art regarding information exchange in the industrial automation branch. One of its major improvements is that the application area is no longer limited to industrial automation. Thus, OPC UA can be applied almost in every domain facing challenges in automated control. Besides communication services, information modeling is the key concern of OPC UA. For adopting OPC UA in the context of Smart Grids, three important data structures—the CIM, the IEC 61850, and IEC 61131-3 for industrial control programming—have been identified to be integrated into OPC UA communication. Within this chapter, the OPC UA is basically introduced and its historical development is described. Furthermore, underlying principles for information modeling and communication services are explained. After taking profiling and security concepts of the OPC UA into consideration, the mappings to Smart Grid semantics are analyzed in a more detailed way.

Testing is indispensable when implementing complex systems, but in the case of communication standards, independent testing of different systems does not suffice. Instead, interoperability tests involving all systems, that are to communicate with each other, are needed. This chapter explains, how the efforts for this tests can be minimized, what additional benefits are achievable, and what limitations exist. Additionally, testing for the major Smart Grid standard families IEC 61850 and CIM will be exemplified.

The series of international standards IEC 61850 substation communication networks and systems to provide a basis for interoperability, the establishment of a seamless communications network of the power system. This study is the substation automation technology has entered the network development process, the study of IEC61850 based on the interoperability of substation and the substation communication network performance.

The Smart Grid will enhance the generation, distribution, transmission, and use of electricity by incorporating elements that will greatly help improve energy efficiency. In addition to traditional components, it will also incorporate small-scale generators, such as home wind turbines and solar panels, into the larger grid. In order to enable energy efficiency as well as other features, two-way communication between utilities and customers (users) will be required. This communication will most likely travel in large part over public networks. The Smart Grid, through the addition of bi-directional communication links throughout the infrastructure, will enable utilities to enhance their service, monitoring, and maintenance activities. Electric power substations will play a major role in the Smart Grid. IEC 61850 is a family of standards that defines network protocols, and data and device naming conventions for electric substation automation. IEC 61850 provides utilities with the ability to better monitor operation and even remotely control the substation when necessary. Part of the utility-substation communication link will be facilitated by public networks (e.g. the Internet). This chapter provides an overview of the IEC 61850 standards and discusses recent experiences with IEC 61850. Challenges facing IEC 61850 deployments, namely security, are presented. Potential solution paths to these challenges are provided.

Protection in distributed energy systems depends on the operation of a set of coordinated protective devices spread around the power system. Usually these devices encompass some communication skills and can be remotely operated by energy management systems. Despite this interaction readiness, most of them rely only on non-standard communication protocols and some interoperability issues still remain. This paper presents an innovative plug & play approach for the integration of protective devices, supported by a standard-based and service-oriented software infrastructure entitled NEMO. This approach adopts the IEC 61850 semantic information model and the DPWS specific communication service mapping, to perform a seamless device integration and communication of protective devices.

The majority of network traffic in process control networks is generated by industrial communication protocols, whose implementation represents a considerable part of the code that runs in process control systems. Consequently a large number of attack techniques that apply to process control systems can be conducted over industrial communication protocols. In this chapter we provide a technical discussion of possible vulnerabilities in industrial communication protocols, with specific reference to the IEC 61850 and ModBus protocols. We provide technical background on IEC 61850 and ModBus, and thus proceed with a description of possible vulnerabilities in those protocols. We also elaborate on how those vulnerabilities are exploited, and thus describe various techniques that leverage such exploitations to maximize physical damage to digitally controlled physical infrastructures such as power plants and electrical substations. The main goal behind this chapter is to provide the reader with technical insight that is workable in researching and engineering a better cyber defense for process control systems.

High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) is a redundancy protocol that provides duplicated frames for separate physical paths with zero recovery time. HSR is suitable for time critical applications in Industrial Ethernet Networks. However, the existing HSR scheme makes the unnecessary traffic by redundant frame copies. This drawback will degrade the network performance and may cause network congestion or delays. Thus, we propose a packet transmission scheme with different periods based on HSR ring topology for reducing network traffic load. Since it uses different transmission period by IEC 61850 traffic types, it can be adaptive for smart grid automation network technology. The main idea of the proposed scheme is using a different packet transmission period on each port of the HSR node. On one port near to destination, the node sends packets with the default transmission period, which is the same with the existing HSR scheme. On the other port, the node sends packets with an extended transmission period according to the delay requirement of IEC 61850 traffic types. By using the extended transmission period, the proposed scheme can reduce the network traffic and retain HSR network's availability. Also, we evaluate the proposed scheme by using OPNET simulation tool. The performance evaluation results show that the proposed scheme is better than the existing HSR scheme.

In the aspect of stable operation for smart grid, the combination of communication technology is an important component. This paper proposes the design and implementation of a packet analyzer dedicated to IEC 61850 for effectively analyzing standard protocols for IEC 61850 communication networks. A substation automation system consists of a station, bay, and process level. Since the amount of packets is massive in IEC 61850, we need to develop a packet analyzer for analyzing communications between the substation automation system server and client, which demands real-time operation and high reliability. Our packet analyzer is implemented with FLA (fast later access) and DPI (deep packet inspection) features as a network application analyzing only IEC 61850 communication protocols. The experimental results show that our packet analyzer outperforms the existing Wireshark program significantly in terms of the packet analysis time.

Availability and functionality of reliable and efficient electric energy systems are pre-requisites for economic and social welfare. The continuous growth of electric energy consumption as well as the upcoming large-scale integration of distributed and renewable energy production units (e.g. photovoltaic system, wind turbines, etc.), result in a more and more complex electric network. Current developments in the power and energy distribution domain lead to active distribution networks (i.e. Smart Grids) to overcome limitations and shortcomings of actual approaches. Several standardisation bodies, international organisations and various projects state that one major precondition for the realisation of the vision Smart Grids is the implementation of intelligent devices. In order to realise such intelligent devices several topics (e.g. communication, control, safety, etc.) have to be taken into account. A key topic in the area of Smart Grids development is the standardisation issue. In order to develop interoperable solutions international standards have to be taken into account. The main scope of this work is to discuss a simulation-based validation approach for testing and validating standard-based implementations of intelligent devices in Smart Grids.

An electrical substation is a subsidiary station of an electricity generation, transmission and distribution system where voltage is transformed from high to low or the reverse using transformers. Substation communication plays a vital role in power system operation. The power industry is changing; there is more or less a global electrical power market with international power companies. Thus, national differences in for example communication protocols, special substation automation solutions etc, are an economic obstacle when the international electric companies are seeking even better productivity and economic performance. It is therefore necessary to design Substation Automation Systems that are more cost effective to operate and maintain and that ensure quicker returns on investment than in the past. It is therefore necessary to design Substation Automation Systems that are more cost effective to operate and maintain and that ensure quicker returns on investment than in the past. This new perspective with reference to the conceptual design and engineering of modern control systems, has been the driving force for the new standard IEC 61850, with a global approach on communication and information handling.

The traditional means of power telecontrol communication must be changed because of the use of IEC 61850 standards in Substation communication. Considering the integration of IEC 61850 standards and IEC 61970, this paper presents an IEC 61850/OPC-based telecontrol communication model. The telecontrol information can be exchanged through ACSI/MMS services between IEDs in substation and OPC server in control center. The OPC server performs the mapping of IEC 61850 information models and OPC information model, and publishes information to SCADA applications which run as OPC clients. A prototype system is built to verify the feasibility of the model. It is proved that this system can meet the real-time requirements. It is different from gateway and need no complex protocol conversion.

In recent years, IEC 61850 supports the substation automation and the standardized communication technique in both station bus and process bus. In this paper, we propose the required techniques to develop the Merging Unit, which is one of the important data acquisition equipments in substation automation, under the IEC 61850 communication protocol. Especially, we also propose the precision time-synchronization technique using IRIG-B protocol for the Merging Unit. IEC 61850-9-2 SV (Sampled Value) service is applied to the Merging Unit which is designed using embedded processor and real-time Linux operating systems. The playback program, which can reconstruct the transmitted sampled value data on the basis of time information, is developed and the performance of the IEC 61850 SV service for Merging Unit is verified experimentally.