Following the upgrade of INFO TECH IEC61850 Software Library to support Edition 2.1 of the standard, in November 2020  INFO TECH team has completed the first upgrade of our customer product for conformance with Edition 2.1.

This new option of the IEC 61850 server interface configuration comes as an alternative to the already available support of either Edition 1 or Edition 2 in the former release.

Our internal verfication testing has been possible thanks to the parallel upgrade of INFO TECH 61850 Avenue toolset software. Its upcoming release (planned for December 2020) will offer this capability to the licensees.

Now we are looking forward to the first conformance test session in accordance with the new test procedures specified by the UCA IUG.

During the year 2020 INFO TECH gained 4 new customers licensing our IEC 61850 software library, while 8 of our long term customers acquired upgrades of our Library, aiming at Edition 2 / Edition 2.1 of the standard which is already supported by INFO TECH software. Also, due to the newly explored market areas in Europe and Asia, we could experience a significant increase in the sales of the licenses to our testing and simulation toolsets: 61850 Avenue and 61850 SCL Runner.

Based on the market research we can claim that the very first implementations of the IEC 61850 Ed.2.1 server interface in protection relays are based on INFO TECH Library ! Thus, we can congratulate our customers to be the lucky market leaders of 2021 - knowing that "luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" (Seneca discovered this already in the 1st century AC).

We are pround that despite of the global pandemic situation, the resulting recession and its eventual impact on power industry, it was possible to retain the strong co-operation with our key customers, for whom INFO TECH software and the related services bring true and unreplaceable added value to their products. Thank You All for this !

Like in the previous year, in 2020 the market interest in our expert level IEC 61850 trainings remained high, though the situation allowed us to organize only 2 residential courses with emphasized hands-on part. But every cloud has a silver lining 🙂 and we could turn this situation into improving our capability of offering remote training courses using video-conferencing tools.

In this year our open IEC 61850 training session was again organized in LINTE² Laboratory of Gdansk University of Technology, gathering 14 participants from 8 companies and institutions. In co-operation with the staff of our host, Faculty of Electrical and Control Engineering, we managed to assure the mandatory safety conditions while still being able to run hands-on exercises and presentation of LINTE² Laboratory facilities based on the IEC 61850 communication. Unfortunately, the safety regulations forced us to limit the number of seats in the training room, despite of the market interest.

Our IEC 61850 training course collected the following ratings in the evaluation scale from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest):

Training material rated 4.6

Competence of instructors rated 4.8

Significance to participant's work rated 3.8

Novelty of acquired information rated 4.0

General evaluation of the training rated 4.0

The following topics have been especially appreciated by the participants:

• essential add-ons and changes brought by Edition 2.1 of the standard with their demonstration already implemented in the INFO TECH toolsets,
• cybersecurity issues in accordance with the IEC 62351,
• processing of SCL files during the system engineering and the capability of system simulation based on SCL files,
• hands-on exercises with frame analysis for communication troubleshooting (using a new extended version of WireShark application was developed and provided by INFO TECH to enable complete MMS and GOOSE message interpretation in accordance with the IEC 61850 semantics).

Youtube - Szkolenie z Komunikacji IEC 61850 | 13-15 października 2020 | Gdańsk

In June 2020 INFO  TECH has released a new version of 61850 Avenue toolset with new capabilities.

The client tool:

- supports secure connections using TLS,

- allows to search for specified objects of the server,

- offers an improved generation of an ICD file from the information explored from a server device.

GOOSE and SV toolsets allow to communicate not only over Ethernet network but also using routable communication over IP protocol.

Welcome to learn the details of the new release of the 61850 Avenue toolset.

INFO TECH testing and simulation tools for the IEC 61850 standard based communication are already licensed to over 100 companies and research institutions from 5 continents.