Engineer, document and maintain IEC 61850 based protection systems

With the increased complexity of automation systems in high and medium voltage substation due to a more advanced implementation and use of IEC 61850 [1], the need for better overviews of how protection and operating functions are implemented in these systems is becoming a bigger challenge. The traditional substation documentation is no longer sufficient and needs to be augmented based on the requirement that users and stakeholders of these systems need. This to be able to operate and maintain such systems in an unambiguous and safe way. The visualization of functions and their relationships is one way to overcome this hurdle and the Visual Specification Method has proven to be a valuable tool in this process. Based on practical issues with substation wide functions that have been implemented using IEC 61850 it is shown that this method can help to simplify the overview of such functions and provide the users with the specific details they need.