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Standards Development
The objective of this standard is to provide a comprehensive set of rules and specifications for the use of virtualised environments within IEC 61850 protection, automation and control systems (PACS). It focuses on IEC 61850.
The core parts of IEC 61850, namely engineering, data modelling and communication, have been designed to be independent of each other. These parts should remain independent of the technologies used to provide the virtualised environment. Furthermore, these IT technologies are likely to evolve over the coming years and IEC 61850 must be future-proof. Therefore, only the concept of virtualisation will be described in this document, and no IT technologies will be promoted in this technical report.
The hybrid mode for PACS will be considered as one of the use cases, where one part of the PAC still uses a non-virtualised environment, e.g. the main one protection, automation and control applications, and the other part does not, e.g. the main two protection, automation and control applications.
All the parts involved in the virtualised environment will be taken into account: hardware, middleware and software.
The IEC 61850 data model has been designed to be independent of the implementation in the devices, which makes it ready for virtualised environments. This independence allows the decoupling of physical interfaces between the process layer and Protection, Automation and Control (PAC) applications. This is achieved through the use of GOOSE and SV, enabling IEC 61850 PAC applications to be deployed on generic hardware and in virtualised environments.
In addition, recent work in WG10 allows functions and data flow to be specified fully independently of their allocation to IED, facilitating the transition to a virtualised environment. However, to take full advantage of virtualisation, the IEC 61850 ecosystem needs to be extended. An exhaustive review of the different parts of the standard series (engineering process, data model…) is planned to take into account the virtualised environment.
The introduction of virtualisation should not be limited to the removal of hardware adherence from conventional IED to get what is commonly called ‘virtual’ IED. The PACS should be designed to support engineering, deploying of independent IEC 61850 PACS applications with the ability to update, remove and add applications to achieve the flexibility expected by the market.
Applying new software technologies from the IT domain to the PACS domain is not trivial. Special care of PACS requirements in terms of reliability, availability, EMC, cybersecurity, maintenance, lifecycle… shall be considered before deploying these technologies to power utility automation.
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