IEC 61850 client, basics

The WinCC OA IEC 61850 client is a native driver designed to communicate with IEC 61850 compliant devices. The communication protocol used by the client is MMS over TCP/IP. The client is supported on Windows and Linux and can be used for:

  • Retrieving data in polling mode
  • Receiving data unsolicited (reporting compliant with the IEC 61850 standard)
  • Writing data to a device

Information retrieved can be measurement, status, protection and control information. For writing control information to a device, command objects as defined by the standard are supported (see also entry below). The client ships with an engineering tool which allows managing and monitoring your configured devices.

Note:

According to the IEC standard control data must be written by the means of a command object. This object must be transmitted to the device as an atomic structure. See chapter IEC 61850 Control Model for further information.

Note:

Time and quality information for unsolicited transfers (reporting), as defined by the IEC 61850 standard, are only available for attributes (tags) of the data set type FCD if they are supported according to the IEC 61850 standard. See Details of the IEC 61850 client for a list of supported attributes. For all other attributes and when polling is used no quality information is available and the timestamp is using the client time, i.e. the time of the machine where the driver is running.

Certification

The WinCC OA IEC 61850 client of WinCC OA version 3.16 P012 was certified in conformance with IEC 61850 edition 1 and 2 for Windows 10 and CentOS 3.10.0.

Refer to the respective documents for further information:

Chapter Description
IEC 61850 client, basics Overview and links to the other chapters.
Requirements and installation Requirements and installation of IEC 61850 client.
Configuration of the IEC 61850 client Description of the IEC 61850 client configuration panel.
Secure Connection Information on secure connection using TLS encryption
IEC 61850 client address panel Description of peripheral address panel parameter settings.
File Transfer Information on downloading files from an IED.
Redundancy Information on Redundancy
Possible config entries Description of possible config entries for the IEC 61850 client.
Internal data points of the IEC 61850 client Table of internal data point elements.
Details of IEC 61850 client driver Detailed description of the IEC 61850 client.

System Management Overview

Different Configuration tools can be opened for the IEC 61850 driver in the System Management:
Figure 1. System Management - Driver IEC