Reliability and availability for substation communication systems using IEC61850

Abstract

The use of IEC 61850 for substation automation system (SAS) has enabled interoperability among the communication devices from different vendors but the IEC 61850 does not specifies any particular type of communication architecture for a particular type of substation and neither it demands any redundancy for even critical substation functions. However, it demands for the communication architecture with zero point of failure. Therefore, it is important to analyse the reliability and availability of the communication topologies used for the SAS. This paper demonstrates how the reliability block diagrams (RBD’s) can be used to calculate the reliability and availability of the different communication topologies for substation automation. Further, the results are compared and analysed to find the most reliable topology for the SAS of a typical substation layout.