Real-Time Modeling and Testing of Distance Protection Relay Based on IEC 61850 Protocol

This article contributes to the evaluation of the performance and the precision of the IEC 61850 protocol implementation for real-time simulation. The importance of this study stems from two facts. First, the simulation is a required stage of any design process including that of an IEC 61850 model of utilities, which may include an automation system from two or more vendors. Second, verification of the vendor’s claim to be compliant with a specific edition of IEC 61850 relies in part on the simulation. We validate the interfacing of the IEC 61850 generic object-oriented substation event (GOOSE) and sampled value (SV) packets through the I/O modules of the simulation environment. In addition, this protocol interfacing is applied to validate a distance protection relay model using the IEC 61850 modules of GOOSEs and SVs in the HYPERSIM real-time simulator taking advantage of an SGI parallel supercomputer. The distance protection relay is implemented in Simulink, tested and validated with MATLAB Simscape Power Systems and imported into HYPERSIM via the HYPERLINK module. The simulation result has been evaluated in terms of reliability and time delay which plays an important role for the communication and cyber systems in smart grids. This real-time simulation setup is valuable for prototyping, analysis, and validation of control algorithms compliant with IEC 61850.