Implementing Substations Automatic Control Functions Designed With Petri Nets on IEC 61850

This paper shows how cooperative automatic control functions in transmission substations, specified by Petri Nets (PN), fit the IEC 61850 standard. In the PN model, each automaton is specified by an interpreted state machine communicating with others through shared conditions, featuring operational improvements and still ensuring good behavior, as it can be proven through formal analysis. However, to avoid jeopardizing the good properties of the model in a distributed implementation, a few rules on how to split the functions in concurrent tasks must be followed, particularly on how some runtime conflicts have to be resolved. Although the IEC 61850 environment provides a set of communication services for the substations functions, implementing PN specifications on it is not a straightforward process. Therefore, a new class of logical nodes is proposed to model the functions required for that purpose.