IEC 61850 Client Redundancy for Substation Automation System

This paper presents an overview of System level redundancy implementation in an IEC61850 based Client application and method used to reduce recovery time after failure of the station level application (IEC 61850 Client, HMI and Database). The authors have presented the implementation of a dual Server hot-standby redundancy architecture, Network Driver (NDIS-Network Driver Interface Specification) for heartbeat communication, network teaming for redundant network redundancy and database replication for substation data integrity and availability of substation data/event. This paper also discusses different redundancy modules (Redundancy Manager, IEC 61850 Client Driver, HMI, Database Module) integration like API integration between Network driver (NDIS) and IEC 61850 Client application. The implementation of data queue in IEC 61850 Client to avoid data loss during server switch over is discussed in this paper. The authors have presented the various fail-over mechanisms in this system. As the redundancy has a direct impact on the cost and complexity of the system, the proposed solution in this paper has addressed the needs of application criticality and customer requirements.