Lessons Learned from Quantifying IEC 61850 Station bus Performance

The paper discusses several key findings and observations related to the performance of a high voltage IEC 61850 substation before it was energized. The impact of organisational structure, skills, tools, data, and performance measurement methodologies on the utility's ability to transition to the automated substation is contextualised with the results indicating that it is possible to analyse and debug a substation communication network using open-source tools. The analysis of station bus performance revealed that the duration of a successful RSTP topology change, ranged from 5s to 24s, impacting GOOSE reception during that time. Furthermore, when traffic was injected to increase traffic on the inter-switch uplink ports to full capacity, the MMS transmission failed between the SCADA Gateway and IED under test because the traffic needed to traverse across the switches. Finally, the paper highlights how the networked substation itself, configurable substation devices and redundancy makes understanding the root cause of observations both complex and time consuming.