W. Liang et al.
Table 2. Conductive devices mapping relationship.
Conductive devices type CIM Model
CBR Breaker
DIS Disconnecter
LIN AC Line Segment
DC Line Segment
… …
3. Intelligent Remote Technology Meeting the IEC Protocol
Currently, the communication between the smart substation and the dispatch center still use traditional
IEC60870-5-101 or 104 protocols. The system need to transform the IEC61850 to the 101/104 protocol so that
the communication complete successfully [7]. Because the traditional protocol does not support the ob-
ject-oriented modeling methods, the system must transform the IEC61850 object to certain information points,
leading to extremely complex configuration tasks of forwarding information, which greatly increases the work-
load of the system and results in many errors, for example, unable to achieve seamless interconnection, as
shown in Figur e 2.
To solve the problems, it is necessary to develop a new generation of smart remote device, which use
IEC61850 as communication protocol. It can make sure the consistent between the communication model and
the substation data model, avoid series of project implementation and maintenance issues, such as model con-
version, secondary configuration and transmission test. The smart remote device solves the following two tech-
nical difficulties, as shown in Figure 3.
Firstly, for the dispatch system, the IEC61850 describes the substation data model over detailed. The SCD file
contains full data of various voltage levels. But the dispatch center of different levels concerns various contents.
For example, the junior dispatch center cares about 110 kV voltage level, while the senior dispatch center cares
about 220 kV or 500 kV voltage level. It is obviously unrealistic if the substations upload the whole SCD file to
every different level of dispatch center, and ask them to pick out the data they need from the massive data.
Secondly, different from 101/104 protocol, the iec61850 protocol don’t control the priority of data, which
means that the data isn’t divided into junior and senior level data, and rapid transmission of important data can-
not be guaranteed. For example, when a large number of telemetry data is sent to the dispatch center cyclically,
meanwhile, the switcher operates and the information must be sent to the dispatch center. It is likely the data
can’t be delivered on dispatch center immediately because the communication bandwidth is limited. Therefore,
in order to achieve the communication sharing based on IEC61850, the remote device must be smarter. It is not
only the communication gateway device forwarding message transparently, but also the server filtering and re-
structuring data. It gathers, filters and groups the IED’s data, to form a new dataset such as 500 kV dataset, 220
kV dataset, etc. and send to the dispatch centers, depending on the information content required for the different
dispatch center. Considering the problem that the iec61850 don’t have priority control, it is proposed to revise
the current mechanisms of MMS services, to interrupt the data being transmitted and insert the higher- priority
data in this paper. Additionally, we may reinforce communication channel’s quality controlling or use another
channel to transmit the important data such as the switcher operation information, to ensure that the important
data be sent in real time.
4. Conclusions
Currently, source maintenance functions still remain in the preliminary stage, and there is no practical engineer-
ing solution. This paper researched on the source maintenance key technology of the smart substation, proposed
practical techniques method. The substation provides SVG and SCD documents to the dispatch center, which
includes Primary equipment information and the network topology. The dispatch center’s automation system
completes the conversion between the two models. The dispatch center and substation communicate through the
smart remote device, which based on IEC61850 protocol. The dispatch center’s automatic system does not need
to model the data, and the data modeling work is done at the substation side. By doing this, the workload of the
dispatch center is reduced substantially. Furthermore, the need of manual configuration of substation sending