Digital Substation is an engineering publication focused on IEC 61850 automation, protection systems, and digital grid intelligence.
IEC 61850 interoperability testing is under way in Utrecht, where equipment and software from multiple suppliers are being integrated into common protection, automation and control applications. Participant reports now cover functional protection tests, network configuration from SCD files and virtualised protection.
Work on harmonizing the Common Information Model (CIM) and IEC 61850 is increasingly focused on formal rules that software tools can process directly. For digital substations, this opens the way to automatic transformation of engineering data and automatic consistency checking between models at different levels.
A new and important mechanism for validating SCL files is emerging in the IEC 61850 engineering process: OCL (Object Constraint Language), a language for formally describing constraints and rules for the objects of an information model.
If you have ever opened an SCL file from another vendor and wondered whether it is actually correct — not just well-formed XML, but semantically valid against the IEC 61850 standard — you already understand the problem that OCL is trying to solve.