Analysis and Evaluation of the IEC 61850 Communication Standard for Monitoring and Control of Distributed Energy Resources

A future energy regime based on more distributed and fluctuating generation requires sophisticated communication solutions to monitor and control an increasing number of distributed energy resources (DERs). Many of the necessary communication solutions require IP-based communication protocols. This work examines one important candidate for such a protocol, the IEC 61850 communication standard.

The IEC 61850 standard is a feature-rich protocol that was first solely designed for substation automation. This work is the first to assess in detail how well IEC 61850 is suited for the control of DERs by analyzing qualitative and quantitative aspects. The qualitative criteria comprise functionality, interoperability (through information models), security and usability. The quantitative metrics under investigation are message size (how efficiently messages are encoded) and processing performance. They are analyzed analytically and experimentally using profiling and benchmarking.

These criteria are largely influenced by the following three aspects of the standard: (1) its data model, (2) its communication mappings and (3) its implementation design. After an individual analysis of these aspects, this work presents an in-depth performance analysis. Finally, the protocol is compared to the metering protocols DLMS/COSEM and SML as well as the automation protocol OPC UA.

The results of this work have been presented in several IEEE conferences as well as a journal paper. The IEC 61850 and ASN.1 BER libraries developed as part of this work are now in widespread use by companies and organizations world-wide. Among other applications the software is used for the control of wind farms and CHP units.