Tekvel Park at IEC 61850 Europe
IEC 61850 in Europe
Alex Golovin has already shared his thoughts on the differences in approaches to implementation of IEC 61850 in Europe in his note for Digtial Substation (unfortunately available in Russian-only). I would just sum up in a few words. There are quite a few substation with IEC 61850 in Europe. The level of propagation of IEC 61850 could differ dpendent on the particular country or utility. Sampled Values are not yet very popular and mostly implemented in pilot projects, MMS is de-facto a standard solution for SAS and SCADA and GOOSE is slowly moving from the area of interlockings to more critical (and particularly time-critical) applications with TRIP as final destination. I’ve noticed the major difference between utilities in Europe and Russian in attention to SCL-files. SCL documents were noted in several papers presented during the conference, where utilities were using system engineering tools to created SCD files and continued using them on different stages. I assume, that interest to SCL in Europe was one of the reasons why Tekvel Park became so popular there.
About Tekvel Park
Tekvel Park is an advancement of GOOSE Wheel, that we have already described in our blog and that is widely used by engineers aroud the globe for around half a year. Just a short reminder, here are the main capabilities of the GOOSE Wheel (aka GW):
- SCL syntax validation;
- GOOSE and SV communications visualization based on SCD-file;
- Human-readable documentation generation with description of GOOSE and SV communications (just to include into the project);
- Check for misconfiguration, configuration errors and “bad habits” in configuration.
Basically we saw a great interest for the mentioned capabilities from utilities, as they give them means to evaluate the quality of contractor’s work. This is particularly important as utilities become responsible for system performance and quality after Factory Acceptance Test, which is a little bit different from what we have in Russia, where the resposibility goes to utility when the full system is commissioned by a third-party engineering company. So being able to evaluate the quality of configuration at FAT stage with some independent tool is essential.
Although visualisation and analysis look great, we decided to go further and implemented Live Mode in GOOSE Wheel.
Live Mode (aka Live) makes static visualization alive, checking if existing data flow in the substation correspond to the configuration in SCD.
In order to be able to “walk into” the substation we provided the GOOSE Wheel with special primary data aquisition and pre-processing devices, called Live View Boxes (LVB). LVB is based on Avacha platform with slightly different configuration and another firmware.
LVBs are sniffering network traffic, analyse it and transfer data on certain events o Tekvel Park Server (TPS). In case of any unexpected events with communications (or, for example, mismatch of real communications with configuration file) TPS generates alarms and logs all events. Maintenance personnel can easily review current system conditions as well as all historic information. LVB and TPS together combine in a single system, that performs the following functions:
- Project configuration management and version control
- SCL syntax validation
- GOOSE and SV communications visualisation
- Configuration analysis for GOOSE and SV control blocks
- Live GOOSE communications monitoring
- Live SV communications monitoring
- Monitoring of compliance between live communications with project configuration
- Logging of communication and configuration failures.
All mentioned functionality would be available for public testing with specially developed “software-LVBs” within a month. We are ready to supply Tekvel Park for real project by June 2017.
By the way GOOSE Wheel functionality is already available at http://park.tekvel.com, do not hesitate to ask for demo right now.