IEC 61850

The IEC 61850 I/O interface allows connecting to various IED through publishing and subscribing of GOOSE and Sampled Values messages. It also permits instantiating MMS servers in the simulator, in order to send reports to clients and to allow them to read or write data. Using a standard network interface card, this protocol can be easily and rapidly integrated into any simulation model.

With the proper user configuration, a driver is initialized on the target simulator at the start of the simulation and begins publishing and subscribing to other IED as well as reporting any changes to MMS clients. The driver makes use of asynchronous threads on dedicated cores in order to achieve high performance.

Migration details

This interface was introduced in HYPERSIM 2022.1 as a redesigned IEC 61850 solution, with added support for the Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) feature. It is meant to replace the previous implementation, which hereafter will be considered legacy. The legacy interface's documentation can be found here.
In order to facilitate the migration from the legacy solution to the new one, a converter tool was made. It permits porting the configuration of the interface along with its created connections. The converter can be reached by right-clicking on the legacy interface instance and selecting Convert to V2.., as seen in the image below:

The documentation for the converter tool can be found here.

Introduction

IEC 61850 is a standard for the design of electrical substation automation. It is part of the International Electrotechnical Commission's (IEC) Technical Committee 57 reference architecture for electric power systems. The abstract data models defined in IEC 61850 can be mapped to a number of protocols. Current supported mappings in the standard are to GOOSE (Generic Object Oriented Substation Event), SV (Sampled Values) and MMS (Manufacturing Message Specification). GOOSE and SV can run over substation LANs using high-speed Ethernet switches to obtain even the most restrictive response times (less than 3 ms) for protective relaying.
HYPERSIM implements the exchange of GOOSE messages (based on chapter IEC 61850-8-1), exchange of SV messages (based on documents IEC 61850-9-2LE and IEC 61869-9) and MMS mapping services (including reporting, also based on chapter IEC 61850-8-1).

IEC 61850-8-1 GOOSE

GOOSE is a control model mechanism in which data (status, values) are grouped into data sets that must be sent and received within a time period of 3 milliseconds for the most restrictive protection applications.
GOOSE data is directly embedded into Ethernet data packets and is exchanged on a publisher-subscriber mechanism on multicast or broadcast MAC addresses.
The same GOOSE message is retransmitted with increasing retransmission time intervals until an event occurs among the data set's elements. At that point, a new message will begin to be broadcast at high speeds containing the most up to date data. Therefore, a message is considered retransmitted if its state number (stNum) is the same as the one of the previous message. Conversely, when the stNum changes, it means that a change has occurred among the GOOSE data set's elements. 
Please refer to the IEC 61850-8-1 chapter for further information about the support of GOOSE messages in the IEC 61850 standard.
The contents of GOOSE messages are described in SCL (Substation Configuration Language) files. For more information about the SCL file format, please refer to the IEC 61850-6 chapter of the IEC 61850 standard. 

IEC 61850-9-2LE Sampled Values

To facilitate easy synchronization and efficient combination in substations for some signals, the so-called logical merging unit (MU) was introduced. It combines the currents and voltages from three phases along with the neutral currents and voltages into one data set, to transmit them as Sampled Values messages to all subscribing IED (Intelligent Electronic Devices). The UCA international users group has published the “Implementation guideline for digital interface to instrument transformers using IEC 61850-9-2“. This guideline is an agreement of the vendors participating in the UCA users group on the implementation specifics of digital interfaces to instrument transformers. IEC 61850-9-2 leaves both the grouping of signals into data sets and the sampling rate as free engineering parameters. To reduce acceptance problems, the user convention IEC 61850-9-2LE has recommended values for the most common applications i.e. using 80 samples per cycle for protection and 256 samples per cycle for power quality.

IEC 61869-9 Sampled Values

This standard extends the use of Sampled Values to customizable data sets and sampling rates. The content of an IEC 61869-9 SV message must be described in an SCL file, similarly to GOOSE messages.

IEC 61850-8-1 MMS

MMS is an international standard dealing with messaging systems for transferring real time process data and supervisory control information between networked devices or computer applications. In the IEC 61850 standard, it is the communication protocol chosen to implement a client-sever TCP/IP communication link.
There are two ways to exchange data between clients and servers: through reporting (initiated by servers) or polling (initiated by clients).
A report is an event based transmission of a data set's contents, according to specific trigger options. Its definition is found in an SCL file, similarly to GOOSE and SV IEC 61869-9. The file contains information about the data set the report uses, what its triggers are and which optional fields to include in the packet. When one of the trigger conditions is met, the server IED will send a report containing all data attributes of the concerned data set to all connected clients.
On the other hand, polling is done by the client by performing a direct read of a data attribute that is part of the server.