Teaching Digital Control of Substation and IEC 61850 With a Test Bench Validation

This paper proposes an original Smart-Grid test bed aimed at teaching the IEC 61850 standard to students and professionals. It includes emulation of medium voltage loads and generators, with a supervisory control and data acquisition system. With this test bed, lab classes focused on the setup and configuration of protection relays using semantics of xml language are proposed. For this, GOOSE services and their functionalities are taught and tested with experiments involving real cases. The presented lab classes are part of a dedicated complete pedagogic module comprising lectures and experiments. Through the development, the test and the deployment of their own solutions in an actual distribution grid, the students learn by integrating theory and practice through the complete chain of Smart-Grid solutions: from the electrical to the communication layers.