Digital Substation

Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.

MMS (Technology)

Taxonomy feed.

Magical case study #2: a report-control-block audit in IEDs — in one click

One click in Tekvel Magic software — and you have a MS Word protocol that covers every IED on the substation: a summary of all URCB/BRCB control blocks with their MMS reference, type, RptEna state, Owner client, triggers, optional fields, DataSet reference, BufTm and IntgPd; plus a detailed section decoding the bit fields and the element-by-element composition of every DataSet — with descriptions taken from the SCL file. The case closes the second half of the SCADA acceptance questions: «how it is configured» is now complemented by «how it is actually working right now», and you instantly see whether reports are sitting idle while SCADA collects data by periodic polling.

Wireshark Capture Filters for IEC 61850 Traffic: A Digital Substation Engineer's Cheatsheet

A practical reference for capture filters in Wireshark when working with IEC 61850 traffic. Why a display filter is not enough on a digital substation (especially of the process-bus generation), how a capture filter differs from a display filter, how the BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) syntax is structured, and ready-to-use filter recipes for GOOSE and SV — from selecting by EtherType and OUI to APPID and multicast addresses.

confRev: How Configuration Revisions Can Ruin Communications

8 out of 10 configurators fail to fully recognize SCD files. We analyze the confRev attribute in GOOSE and SV: what happens when the value does not match the expected one, and how this nearly derailed the commissioning of a real project with 43 IEDs.

ABB introduced MMS support for AFS series Ethernet switches

The number of Ethernet switches with integrated IEC 61850-8-1 server increases. Manufacturers do not only implement standard logical node classes according to IEC 61850-7-4 but also those ones introduced by IEC 61850-90-4 technical report. These switches do also support buffered and unbuffered reporting mechanisms. Seems like the closest future is the one where IEC 61850-8-1 (MMS) communications will replace communications over SNMP (being widely used at the moment). This will allow for integration of Ethernet switches in process control systems the same way as it is done with IEC 61850-8-1 pr

Explore Taxonomies