Modelling and Simulation for Performance Evaluation of IEC61850-Based Substation Communication Systems

With the publishing of IEC 61850, the global communication standard for substation automation system (SAS), interoperability issue between intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) from different venders has been resolved. However, the overall performance and extensibility of this communication network are still left unanswered. This paper introduces the modeling technique of IED generic models and the setup of a research platform for resolving those issues using the OPNET Modeler. These configurable IED models allow the engineers to easily build SAS network model with different topologies for all kinds of substations so that the dynamic performance issues could be studied and rules could be developed to guide the SAS network planning and design. Some examples of using those models to construct SAS network as well as the network performance simulation results are also included in this paper.