Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Electrical Power and Energy Systems journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijepes IEC 61850 based substation automation system: A survey Mohd. Asim Aftab a , S.M. Suhail Hussain b, ⁎ , Ikbal Ali c , Taha Selim Ustun b a Electrical and Instrumentation Engineering Department, Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, Patiala 147001, Punjab, India b Fukushima Renewable Energy Institute, AIST (FREA), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Koriyama 963-0298, Japan c Department of Electrical Engineering, Jamia Millia Islamia (A Central University), Jamia Nagar, New Delhi 110025, India ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Substation Automation System (SAS) Substation Communication Network (SCN) IEC 61850 Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs) Sampled Values (SVs) Generic Object-Oriented Substation Event (GOOSE) ABSTRACT Power systems are undergoing an evolution similar to what telecommunications sector went through several decades ago. Analog and hard-wired systems are replaced with automated digital ones. Infrastructure designs are not static anymore and are geared towards accepting new deployments as easily as possible. Limited data ex- changes of the past are giving way to detailed data collection, reporting and analysis. When equipped with smart algorithms and techniques such as machine learning, these significantly enhance the capabilities of smart grids. Substations are core component of smart grid, where communication system is integrated. However, achieving a standard substation communication system that can operate with the principles of plug-and-play (PnP) is not a trivial task. Considering the cyber-physical nature of power system equipment, integration requires more dili- gence for safe operation. Furthermore, there are many different types of substation equipment which are manufactured by, again, countless many vendors. Achieving a common language and interoperability between them is a difficult task. IEC 61850 standard has been taking strides towards that goal. Its object-oriented structure makes its versatile while well-defined modeling blocks ensures compatibility. Recent work has focused on IEC 61850 based modeling of substation equipment, developing message exchange formats for substation functionalities as well as investigating the performance of different communication technologies when they are used to implement IEC 61850 based models. This paper reviews these efforts, their benefits to substation op- eration and possible future work, including cybersecurity considerations. 1. Introduction Substation plays a vital role in electricity transfer. It converts the voltage level from high to low level and vice versa using power trans- formers and performs switching and protection operations. With the emergence of global energy market, there is a growing competitive environment among different energy suppliers. Due to in- troduction of new players, more formally known as power players, and increasing market pressure, the motive of energy supplier is more to- wards customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is pivoted on transfer of right information to right entity. Thus, there are enormous information exchanges in the energy market. The challenge faced by utilities is managing the information and delivering the right informa- tion to the users who can analyze and use the information for specific applications. Thus, there is a pressing need to develop a standardized architecture to harness the information exchanges. This standardized architecture must be supplier independent and can interoperate with other applications. This paved the way for open system, which is a computer system that embodies supplier independent standard and is interoperable, uses non-proprietary soft- ware and supports easy future upgrades [1]. The advantages of open systems include longer system life, easy upgradeability and supplier independency. In order to sustain the open system, several standardi- zation agencies came forward for developing a standard communica- tion protocol which maps all features of open system and is industry adaptable. By a standard communication protocol, utilities may install devices from different manufacturers which can readily co-operate in the utility’s environment. After deliberate research and numerous meetings, the standardization agency IEC TC 57 came forward and proposed IEC 61850 standard for substation automation. The concept of IEC 61850 standard was applied to the substation, where enormous amount of data is exchanged among various Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs). These IEDs form the backbone of substation automation system. The substation communication was now governed with IEC 61850 which has functional use which was lacking in previous master slave standards such as Distributed Network Protocol (DNP), IEC 60870 etc. The IEC 61850 leverage several benefits from previous standards in terms of data speed, eXtensible Markup https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2020.106008 Received 7 February 2020; Accepted 11 March 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: suhail.hussain@aist.go.jp (S.M.S. Hussain). Electrical Power and Energy Systems 120 (2020) 106008 0142-0615/ © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T