Toward an adaptive protection system for the distribution grid by using the IEC 61850

The use of protection functions on the Medium Voltage network are something far from a real deployment. Nevertheless - across Europe - some pilots where protection devices in secondary substations are coordinated with the one in primary substations are already running. Applications, like logic selectivity, are often studied in cooperation with the IEC 61850 standard. The main limitation of the logic selectivity is protection settings and logics are based on the standard configuration of the power distribution network. Every time the network configuration changes, protection settings and logics are no longer valid. The FP7 European Project IDE4L propose an adaptive fault location, isolation and service restoration cycle - based on the logical selectivity - where the whole protection system is always configured in the optimal way, independently from the network configuration. The paper describes how this is achieved by modelling protection devices via IEC 61850 logical nodes and updating the protection settings and logic in real-time.