The protection relays are capable of vertical communication between the protection relay and monitoring and control systems (clients) such as PCM600 or MicroSCADA. Each protection relay can communicate to five separate clients to receive events, read or write data (an active PCM600 connection is considered to be a client). It is recommended to use three separate clients including PCM600. The protection relay can report data in either buffered or unbuffered mode and execute direct or select-before-operate control sequences according to the control commands sent by the client.
The protection relays are also capable of horizontal or peer-to-peer communication. They can be programmed to publish (send) information to and subscribe (receive) information from other devices according to IEC 61850-8-1.
IEC 61850 standard Edition 2 increased several identification string lengths which affect communication engineering and interoperability. The table lists identification length values to be considered especially with third party tools. ABB tools generally check the length values.
| Object | Edition 2 length | Description |
|---|---|---|
|
IED name |
60 (64-4) |
Excluding the longest LD name length of 4 characters |
|
Report control block name |
30 |
Without a two digit RCB instance number |
|
Data set name |
32 |
|
|
RptID |
129 |
Report Identifier |
|
GoID |
129 |
GOOSE Identifier |
| Control Block | Maximum data sets | Maximum length | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
|
GoCB |
4 |
40 data attributes |
The protection relays allow a maximum of four GOOSE control blocks, which effectively limits the protection relay to four data sets for GOOSE. The sending GOOSE data sets can have a maximum total of 40 data attributes. To minimize the message-handling load in the receiving and sending protection relays, it is recommended to limit data attribute amount to 20 per data set. |
|
RCB |
10 |
40 data attributes |
PCM600 allows a maximum of 10 data sets for the report control blocks. |