Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
In 2023, fourteen European TSOs signed a common statement on IEC 61850 engineering and demonstrated a working proof of concept. Their five-step top-down process — backed by two new IEC technical reports — changes how utilities, IED suppliers, and tool vendors interact. Here is what they built and why it matters.
XML Schema validation checks structure — it cannot verify that a GOOSE subscription references a valid dataset or that a logical node contains required data objects. Object Constraint Language (OCL) fills that gap. IEC TS 61850-6-3, published in 2025, defines how OCL rules should be written and applied to IEC 61850 XML files, laying the groundwork for consistent, formal SCL validation across tools.
This white paper explains how PTP can be used in substation automation systems to overcome incompatibilities and shortcomings of existing time distribution systems.
Protection and control intellectual electronic devices (IEDs) respond to the signals of currents and voltages measured at certain points of the power system, and assess the state of the protected power system component.
Using which IEC 61850 services fault recorders in digital substations must acquire data? How the architecture of fault recording systems must change in digital substation? Experts talk.
GOOSE-messaging has been covered a lot in many technical papers and to add anything valuable to the subject is rather difficult. But we will try. And functional constrained data will help us with that.
There are several applications that can be used for monitoring IEC 61850 traffic in the Ethernet network. But there is one free-of-charge option everyone should know about.
When configuring GOOSE and Sampled Values communications it is useful (and sometimes is a must) to have the possibility to check VLAN and Priority tags. Whether your network adapter driver strips tagging or not will define the availability of these parameters not only while using Wireshark, but also other specific tools for analysis of GOOSE and Sampled Values traffic (Omicron SVScout, Omicron IEDScout, GOOSE Inspector, etc.). Today we will see how to make Intel network adapters not to strip this important info.
In any packet transmitted over Ethernet there are two MAC-addresses present: one is a source MAC-address and another is a destination MAC-address. When forwarding data, Ethernet-switches use this important data. So what is a MAC-address? What are the differences between unicast, multicast and broadcast destination MAC-addresses? What destination MAC-addresses are common for IEC 61850 standard protocols? Let's have a more detailed look on this.