Introduction to PI Connector for IEC 61850

IEC 61850 is a communication standard for electrical substation automation systems. IEC 61850 is a part of the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) Technical Committee 57 (TC57) reference architecture for electric power systems.

PI Connector for IEC 61850 collects electrical substation asset information as well as real-time data from IEC 61850 compliant servers and stores it in the PI System. PI Connector for IEC 61850 is a 61850 client that connects to IEC 61850 servers using the IEC 61850 communication standard (Edition 1 and 2). Note that the connector does not support connection to 61850 servers requiring custom COTP parameters. The abstract data models defined in IEC 61850 can be mapped to a number of protocols (currently, MMS, GOOSE, SMV).

The currently supported functional constraints (FC) are:

• MX: Measurands (analog values)

• ST: Status information

• SP: Setpoint

• BR: Buffered Report

• RP: Unbuffered Report

• DC: Description

PI Connector for IEC 61850 also supports IEC 61400-25, which provides uniform information exchange for monitoring and control of wind power plants (TC 88). This addresses the issue of proprietary communication systems utilizing a wide variety of protocols, labels, semantics, and so on, thus enabling one to exchange information with different wind power plants independently of a vendor. It is a subset of IEC 61400; a set of standards for designing wind turbines. The IEC 61400-25 standard is a basis for simplifying the roles that the wind turbine and SCADA systems have to play. The standard has specified five mapping (IEC 61400-25-4) to communication protocol stacks in order to address the real wind power business needs for communication. The mappings specified in the part of IEC 61400-25 comprises a mapping to SOAP-based web services, OPC/XML-DA, IEC 61850-8-1 MMS, IEC 60870-5-104, and a mapping to DNP3.