With the progressive introduction of IEC 61850 in Electrical Substation´s Protection, Automation and Control Systems (PAC Systems) and the consequent usage of Generic Object Oriented Substation Events (GOOSE) by Intelligent Electronic Devices (IEDs), major challenges appeared in fields such as workforce knowledge, maintenance procedures and the use of new test and diagnostic tools.
In this context, the DSO must take into account this new reality, promoting the development of changes in IEDs maintenance processes, developing new strategies and using new tools to address these issues.
This paper provides a case study concerning the test of typical IEC 61850 GOOSE messages, commonly used by IEDs part of the Portuguese DSO PAC Systems, and its integration in existing maintenance tasks.
With the adoption of this new approach, the Portuguese DSO expects that the preventive and corrective maintenance processes can progressively include more validation tests related with PAC Systems and IED features as a whole, integrating in its conventional operation philosophy the new features inherent to the usage of IEC 61850. It is also expected that this new strategy will bring further improvements to energy supplying reliability and security.