The protection relays are capable of vertical communication between the protection relay and monitoring and control systems (clients) such as ZEE600. 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). 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) and subscribe (receive) information according to IEC 61850-8-1, but only receive according to IEC 61850-9-2LE
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 1 length | Edition 2 length | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| IED name | 28 (32-4) | 60 (64-4) | Excluding the longest LD name length of 4 characters |
| Report control block name | 14 | 30 | Without a two digit RCB instance number |
| Data set name | 32 | 32 | |
| RptID | 65 | 129 | Report Identifier |
| GoID | 65 | 129 | GOOSE Identifier |
| MSVID | 65 | 65 | Multicast Sampled Value Identifier (length as in 61850-9-2 LE) |
| Control Block | Maximum data sets | Maximum length of data set | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoCB | 40 | 20 attributes | |
| RCB | 100 |
Edition 1: 255 attributes Edition 2: 100 data objects |