Towards the formal integration of two upcoming standards: IEC 61970 and IEC 61850

The constant demand for a better integration of utility applications and systems raises the question on the compatibility of standards that were, and still are being developed for the individual utility disciplines. This paper discusses the need for an integration of two particularly important emerging standards related to data interchange in substations (IEC 61850) and control centres (IEC 61970). The relatively independent development of these two standards motivated us to create a model that can show explicitly how concepts from one standard relate to those of the other. Further, by making these models formal, which in the case of IEC 61850 is absent in its current draft, we can show the benefits in checking internal model consistency and in automating the model mapping. Practically, our UML models proved helpful in detecting inconsistencies in draft versions of the IEC 61850 and they served as a basis for the tool-based, bi-directional mapping of IEC 61850 to IEC 61970 data representations.