Substation Automation System Design Process Based on IEC 61850 SCL

With the advent of the international standard IEC 61850 for communication networks and systems in substations, utilities are beginning to implement substation automation systems (SAS) that can give support to interoperability, interchangeability and self-description features. This paper describes with the SAS design accordance with this new standard. After a brief introduction of IEC 61850 SCL, this paper addresses some issues related to the specification of an IEC 61850 based SAS, and describes the Substation Configuration Language (SCL) based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). The SAS design process is explored with examples including the Intelligent Electronic Device (IED) selection, Logical Nodes (LN) allocation and the related services and the SAS communication architecture.