IEC 61850 Process Bus

IEC 61850 Process Bus

Introduction
The protection and control system for the modern electrical
network is a process control system. Protective relays use process
measurements, such as current, voltage, and equipment status,
to determine the need to take control actions, such as tripping or
closing a circuit breaker during a fault event. A typical feeder may
require process measurements as shown in Figure 1.
The standard design for process control in electric utilities places

protective relays in a control house; a completely centralized
data acquisition and control system. Data for each individual

measurement point and control point is an analog signal carried
between the switchyard and the control house using a pair of
copper wires, with this example requiring 15 pairs of copper wires.
These wires may be terminated numerous times between the
primary equipment in the switchyard and the protective relay, with
this feeder requiring as many as 100 terminations. The resulting
design is complex, and very labor intensive to design, document,
install, and commission.
Process bus is the concept of simplifying the design of the

protection and control system by installing data acquisition units in
the switchyard close to process measurement source, and sending
process measurements and control via digital messages over a
communications network. The rationale behind implementing
process bus is to reduce the total time to design and install
protection and control systems by simplifying and standardizing the digital acquisition units in the switchyard. Protection and
the physical interface between protection relays and process control systems must identify faults and take control actions in
measurement points in the switchyard. a few cycles, using currents and voltages from different points
in the switchyard. These measurements must be precisely time
A protection and control systems differs from industrial process synchronized. Therefore process bus systems must transmit
control systems in the requirements for operating speed and explicitly time synchronized raw sampled values of current and
reliability, along with more severe environmental concerns for voltage waveforms to protective relays.
454 www.GEDigitalEnergy.com
The IEC global communications standard IEC 61850 Process bus technical attributes
“Communications networks and systems in substations” defines,
in Part 9, the message formats and time synchronization A practical process bus system designed around IEC 61850 Part
requirements for transmitting raw sampled values over digital 9 communications, must be complete and comprehensive for all
communications. However, IEC 61850 focuses on transparency protection and control applications, fit for purpose for the utility
and standardization of data communications. The standard does switchyard, simple and intuitive to design and install, open and
not define Implementation issues such as suitable architectures, non-proprietary, scalable, reliable, testable, and maintainable. The
reliability, data sharing, maintainability, testability, and scalability. architecture of a process bus system determines how all these
desirable attributes will be met.
Application goal of IEC 61850 In a possible architecture, the process interface unit (PIU) provides
process bus all data acquisition and control points. The PIU is the landing point

for all copper wiring and analog signals in the switchyard. The PIU
then converts all signals into digital signals for communicating
The application goal of process bus is to simplify and standardize through fiber optic cables to protective relays in the control house.
protection and control systems by designing out all copper It is also possible to define PIUs that only transmit sampled values,
signaling. With copper wiring as the interface to protective relays, or only provide equipment status and control points.
the interface for each relay varies from project to project, and
application to application. Each wiring design, and each termination The process bus communications network can follow any of the
of a copper wire is custom designed for the project, and custom standard architectures for communications networks, from a
installed, by hand, in the field, for the project. This method results star (point-to-point) topology, to a redundant ring topology. The
in high labor requirements for engineering, drafting, installation, choice of the communications network topology determines
and commissioning, in a business environment where there is an design constraints and the ability to best meet the desirable
increased focusing on maximum utilization of capital and labor. business improvement from designing out copper wiring. Whatever
communications architecture is chose, process bus provides a
What process bus promises is the ability to meet business standard physical interface to protective relays. The physical design
objectives of reducing capital costs for construction, speeding up of the protection and control system is identical for every project:
construction processes, and fully utilizing labor resources. At its PIUs connected to a fiber optic cable. The only variability in design
heart, process bus is a technical way of providing a mission-critical is where to locate PIUs, and how to lay out the communications
function of P&C, while meeting a business goal of designing out all network.
copper signaling from a switchyard, to achieve considerable cost
savings by simplification of engineering, drafting, construction,
commissioning and ownership. However, the architecture and
components define if an IEC 61850 process bus system will truly
meet business objectives and application goals.
www.GEDigitalEnergy.com 455
Scalability
Process bus architecture
A successful system needs to be scalable, from a single zone of
The design of the process bus system, then, determines the
protection to an entire substation, with the capability to continue
success of the system. Some key attributes require a more detailed
expanding one zone at a time as required. An expansion or
discussion.
modification should not raise any network congestion concerns, or
Comprehensible and complete architecture other problems. The system must be both feasible and economically
attractive in both retrofit and green-field situations.
Any component of the system, including PIUs, protective relays,
communication infrastructure, datasets, time synchronization, and Testability and maintainability
so on can be designed only after a complete architecture is created
The system needs to be provisioned to facilitate testing and
demonstrating the ultimate shape of the system. The architecture
maintenance. Testing is defined here as verification and
needs to be simple and intuitive for all affected disciplines in the
re-verification of a complete protection and control system after

user’s organization. It needs to follow today’s proven protection
it has been deployed – initial commissioning, repair, periodically or
fundamentals and be fit for purpose – addressing the right problem
after a major work such as protection system expansion, firmware
with the right solution. The primary goal is to deliver switchyard
upgrade or component replacement. Maintainability is defined
data to the protection & control devices and to return commands
as the existence of simple, safe and trusted means of performing
from the latter to the switchyard devices. Not all the process data
firmware and setting changes and replacing faulty elements of
is needed by all protective relays. The limited data requirements of
the system. Addressing testability and maintainability is possible
each relay are clearly and unambiguously dictated by the virtually
only by fundamentally engineering these facilities into the system
fixed power equipment arrangement.
at the beginning, not as afterthoughts in an organically developed
Reliability solution.
When increasing the number of electronic devices and connections Cyber security
in a system, the system’s reliability decreases with the increasing
The system needs to be secure from a cyber security point of view.
device count. This can be demonstrated using typical Mean Time
The high data rates of the process bus traffic and the requirement
To Failure (MTTF) data and running calculations on hypothetical
of very high availability of this data create challenges for known
process bus architectures. Results clearly show that each
cyber security solutions such as intrusion detection or encryption.
additional element in the system will increase the failure frequency.
Cyber security issues, if left unattended, may either slow down
In a properly designed architecture compensating measures, which
adoption of the solution by creating the need to augment it later
often increase system complexity and cost, should not be required
for compliance, and/or may create extra cost and effort for the
to make up for artificially reduced reliability.
user when deploying and running the system. The best solution is
Minimal co-dependencies to develop an architecture which does not introduce issues related
to cyber security in the first place.
Today, a single zone of protection can be taken out of service for
upgrades, troubleshooting, periodic testing or maintenance without
impacting the rest of the secondary system and without an outage
in the primary system (for applications where there is a redundant
protection system). A zone of protection can be engineered and
deployed with minimal interactions with respect to other secondary
systems. This separation has proved an indispensable foundation
of practical protection engineering, and needs to be retained in the
next generation solutions. Without proper consideration, a firmware
upgrade for a single digital component of the system may result
in unexpected system behavior and ultimately may trigger a
firmware upgrade to adjacent devices. Such domino effects created
by co-dependencies are undesirable, may introduce latent failure
modes and ultimately would become obstacles in acceptance of
the system.
456 www.GEDigitalEnergy.com 090820-v2

IEC 61850 Process Bus

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

IEC 61850 Process Bus

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

IEC 61850 Process Bus

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

IEC 61850 Process Bus

IEC 61850 Process Bus

The standard design for process control in electric utilities places

data acquisition and control system. Data for each individual

Process bus is the concept of simplifying the design of the

IEC 61850 Process Bus

re-verification of a complete protection and control system after

456 www.GEDigitalEnergy.com 090820-v2

You might also like