India is one of the largest users of IEC 61850 Standard in its substation automation projects together with China. However Indian contribution to the standardization efforts is almost nil.
The standardization efforts of IEC TC57 is conducted by the National Mirror Committee and BIS or Bureau of Indian Standards is responsible for the creation and maintenance of National Mirror Committees for TC57. LITD 10, Power System Control and Association Communications is the National Mirror Committee that should look into efforts of IEC 61850.
However, this committee is mostly dormant and does not involve technical experts in IEC 61850 who can contribute to the IEC 61850 Standardization efforts. India being one of the initial adopters of this standard, the Indian market a very large market for IEC 61850, and the IEC 61850 expanding its scope of work into newer areas, it is imperative that if Indian industry, academia and research institutions want to take mileage and create competitive advantage and drive these efforts, they actively involve in these efforts. This is the only way, India ever can dream of getting into the same league of China in product development and localization in power technologies, that enhances its long term strategic capability to compete with European and American products as well as enter these markets on equal footing. The fact that we have a large enough domestic market should be a chance one should never let go and the Indian government should ensure that the Industry makes good use of the millions of dollars of tax payers money that is spent in India being member of ISO and IEC.
As Professor Sadagopan mentioned at the MAIT / BIS Seminar and interactive session during the visit of ISO Secretary General to Bangalore on 7th December 2007, being part of the IEEE standardization efforts is a recognition of ones technical competence and acceptance by your peers. However, in India, the same is not so with the BIS National Mirror Committees for ISO and IEC.
MAIT Director General in the said meeting, mentioned that the Indian industry participation in standardization for IT (Information Technology) in the national mirror committees is nil, it also indicates the state of Indian IT industry. Indian IT sector is still services focused as well as externally focused with a conformance attitude to western standards, with very less product innovations or product research and development efforts happening. Without an ecosystem being created that promotes efforts by experts in the Industry to participate and contribute to these efforts, and a realization that being part of standardization is a competitive advantage that will drive businesses in the future, be it services or products or IP, there is no way Indian industry is going to be take active part in these efforts. To be part of standardization efforts require expertise that is beyond the skill set of business process or technology adoption, but a more in-depth involvement in the way the technology and business process will drive the future, and collaborating in building a basis for this future road-map.
The fact that BIS comes under the Ministry of Food is another indicator about the overall government focus which is primitive and the need of the day 30-40 years ago, but not now in a services and technology driven market growth. And driven by Bureaucrats rather than technologists in most cases is another indicator of the state of standardization in India, where administrative control and direction is driven by government priorities rather than market necessities. After independence, maybe the key factors that drove standardization might have been food and consumer affairs. However today the standardization globally has expanded beyond these, and India standardization efforts also should broaden its horizon too. There is still a great need to protect the consumers and hence BIS has a big role to play. However, maybe there are highly technical areas or domains where these need to move out of BIS, for eg., the standardization for communications should not be handled by BIS but by a separate national communication standardization body, and maybe CEA (Central Electricity Authority) should drive the efforts in the Electrical Industry.
Without active participation, and maybe multiple standardization efforts that addresses the relevant technical needs of the various committees of ISO / IEC, and an effort in creating an ecosystem right across our academic, national research labs as well as industries, Indian contribution to these efforts shall never be note-worthy. It would be good, if BIS leaves some of the tasks in standardization to some other National Labs or centers of excellence within the Industry, Academia or Central Research Institutes in the relevant area. This would surely help in ensuring that the drivers and expertise is available for the relevant topics.
Also looking at the constitution of some of the National Mirror Committees, the effort seems to be more on accommodating the large companies or industries or National Labs that work in a specific space. However, there has been no effort in ensuring that the people who are active in the standardization efforts are experts in their own merit in the said space. Most of the standardization effort participants in most developed economies are independent experts and consultants or small technology company players in addition to representatives from large companies and national labs. Without such efforts, there is going to be no way forward. Having MD's and CEO's of various companies, may not really ensure that there is contribution happening. As in the IEEE, an expert who contributes on his free will, would also likes to be acknowledged for his or her contribution, that peer recognition what he or she values more. However, if you have the senior management in the Committees, there is no way an expert is going to do a good job at it, other than ensuring that what his Company or MD or CEO wishes are suggested. Unless India is able to create such an ecosystem that foster interaction and discussion among experts and active industry and academic participation, our standardization efforts are never going to come out of the current state of copy/paste or conformance.
A reference to PAC World magazine IEC 61850 cover story indicates the years of discussion and debate that went into the development of IEC 61850, and shows how important it is that there is open and free flow of debate and discussion in Indian mirror committees before we ever get into a stage where India will be able to rightfully contribute. However if BIS, the Indian industry and the academia does not get involved in creating an ecosystem that discusses threadbare IEC 61850 as it is today and participates in the international standardization efforts, there is no way India is ever going to get out if its perpetual state of being in conformance to IEC 61850 standard rather than being able to contribute to standards.
As Mr. Bryden, the ISO Secretary General mentioned, India should move from being in-credible India to credible India and hopefully we all will reach there sometime in the next century.
Saturday, December 8, 2007
Friday, November 30, 2007
Protection Automation and Control Magazine
Protection Automation and Control Magazine pacworld first edition for summer of 2007 has been published. Spearheaded by Alex Apostolov, this magazine promises to be bring more active and open discussion about IEC 61850 and Protection, Automation and Control in general. The industry do indeed need an avenue for technical and expert discussions and opinion makers to bring out their points of view on the current and future challenges it faces.
In his editorial for the first edition, Alex talks about how the IEEE transactions used to have questions and comments on every paper and the authors comments on the same at the end of the paper. He mentions how behind the iron curtain a few decades back as a young protection engineer it gave Alex a global view and meaningful sense of these transactions and the context in which the paper needs to be seen. Now this is no longer a practice that IEEE transaction follows. As he rightly says in all the limited conferences on this subject globally, due to paucity of time and the busy schedule of the modern day world and its intent on accommodating as many things as possible in a very short time, there is no more open discussions and debate on most topics that concern the protection, automation and control engineers of today.
He mentions this to be one of the key objectives of pacworld. However, in addition to discussions and awareness building, it is also important to address some of the other burning facts like increasing academic and research interest in power systems such that more new students opt for these courses, as well as to involve and upgrade the technical knowledge and awareness of the main stream utility engineers and power system experts in the new technology developments in this space.
I believe these objectives to be a very noble and right intent and if this intent is kept alive and remains the driving force of the magazine in the days to come, it shall surely be a great point of convergence of thoughts and minds of the Industry and shall be a must read for all.
PACWORLD Magazine Online - www.pacw.org
In his editorial for the first edition, Alex talks about how the IEEE transactions used to have questions and comments on every paper and the authors comments on the same at the end of the paper. He mentions how behind the iron curtain a few decades back as a young protection engineer it gave Alex a global view and meaningful sense of these transactions and the context in which the paper needs to be seen. Now this is no longer a practice that IEEE transaction follows. As he rightly says in all the limited conferences on this subject globally, due to paucity of time and the busy schedule of the modern day world and its intent on accommodating as many things as possible in a very short time, there is no more open discussions and debate on most topics that concern the protection, automation and control engineers of today.
He mentions this to be one of the key objectives of pacworld. However, in addition to discussions and awareness building, it is also important to address some of the other burning facts like increasing academic and research interest in power systems such that more new students opt for these courses, as well as to involve and upgrade the technical knowledge and awareness of the main stream utility engineers and power system experts in the new technology developments in this space.
I believe these objectives to be a very noble and right intent and if this intent is kept alive and remains the driving force of the magazine in the days to come, it shall surely be a great point of convergence of thoughts and minds of the Industry and shall be a must read for all.
PACWORLD Magazine Online - www.pacw.org
Saturday, September 29, 2007
IEC61850 - Long way to go
IEC 61850 - Expanding Horizons
I do agree with the point that IEC61850 is and will be expanding its horizons especially after redefining its scope from Substations to complete power utility. With object models of Wind and Hydro already available & models of DER, standards of substation - substation and substation - control centre communication & mapping to web services are already underway, it will find a completely different focus. We can even expect revolutionary changes after the possibility of SCL to migrate to CIM to provide complete models needed for an EMS/ DMS systems.
But looking back, can we say that objectives of IEC61850 are completely achieved? Can we say the IEC61850 devices are completely interoperable? I feel that many vendor implementations had made this standard to deviate from its objectives. IEC61850 had provided options for private LNs, data & GGIOs for handling the situations which cannot be handled by the standard models. But now the scenario had reached in such a level that all the vendors are finding it much easy to have private models rather than going for the standard LNs, data or formats which will not help in achieving goals of a global standard. What is the purpose of the total interoperability, if a vendor IED cannot accept a GOOSE because there is a time stamp element? Are the test certificates and interoperability events helping any bit in providing true inter-operability? I feel interoperability still remains a key issue in migrating to IEC61850.
Another area I want to point out is the engineering efforts for IEC61850 which was hyped to be much less comparing with the native mechanisms. But if we notice the tools and systems available for engineering IEC61850 today, it is much oriented on the standards rather than looking from the users’ angle for the configuration. The user has to follow complete & elaborate 61850 standards to achieve the complete configuration. The second is the dependability of vendor tools for configuration is too high that each user needs to know all the vendor tools to achieve even simple configurations like GOOSE mapping. So the current scenario is such that IEC61850 has increased the engineering efforts rather than reducing the same, if one were to do an independent engineering based on the standard.
I personally feel TC57 WG10 had never foreseen such a huge welcome for IEC61850 which made the standard to have some limitation. The standard could have been made with Substation configuration language (SCL) completely compatible with the UML based CIM models. Today, with all implementations working well with the SCL & problems in migrating to CIM, it will require a long way for sending the model information to EMS/DMS systems.
In spite of all these problems, the high benefits in using the standard in comparison with native protocols, is driving the same a long way through. Tissues (technical issues) forum for IEC61850 had come good for the standard which takes users opinion and problems to address the same in revisions. Let’s hope new revisions can throw some light to these problems & come up with effective ways to ensure the interoperability.
I do agree with the point that IEC61850 is and will be expanding its horizons especially after redefining its scope from Substations to complete power utility. With object models of Wind and Hydro already available & models of DER, standards of substation - substation and substation - control centre communication & mapping to web services are already underway, it will find a completely different focus. We can even expect revolutionary changes after the possibility of SCL to migrate to CIM to provide complete models needed for an EMS/ DMS systems.
But looking back, can we say that objectives of IEC61850 are completely achieved? Can we say the IEC61850 devices are completely interoperable? I feel that many vendor implementations had made this standard to deviate from its objectives. IEC61850 had provided options for private LNs, data & GGIOs for handling the situations which cannot be handled by the standard models. But now the scenario had reached in such a level that all the vendors are finding it much easy to have private models rather than going for the standard LNs, data or formats which will not help in achieving goals of a global standard. What is the purpose of the total interoperability, if a vendor IED cannot accept a GOOSE because there is a time stamp element? Are the test certificates and interoperability events helping any bit in providing true inter-operability? I feel interoperability still remains a key issue in migrating to IEC61850.
Another area I want to point out is the engineering efforts for IEC61850 which was hyped to be much less comparing with the native mechanisms. But if we notice the tools and systems available for engineering IEC61850 today, it is much oriented on the standards rather than looking from the users’ angle for the configuration. The user has to follow complete & elaborate 61850 standards to achieve the complete configuration. The second is the dependability of vendor tools for configuration is too high that each user needs to know all the vendor tools to achieve even simple configurations like GOOSE mapping. So the current scenario is such that IEC61850 has increased the engineering efforts rather than reducing the same, if one were to do an independent engineering based on the standard.
I personally feel TC57 WG10 had never foreseen such a huge welcome for IEC61850 which made the standard to have some limitation. The standard could have been made with Substation configuration language (SCL) completely compatible with the UML based CIM models. Today, with all implementations working well with the SCL & problems in migrating to CIM, it will require a long way for sending the model information to EMS/DMS systems.
In spite of all these problems, the high benefits in using the standard in comparison with native protocols, is driving the same a long way through. Tissues (technical issues) forum for IEC61850 had come good for the standard which takes users opinion and problems to address the same in revisions. Let’s hope new revisions can throw some light to these problems & come up with effective ways to ensure the interoperability.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
IEC 61850 is expanding its horizons
Its been quite some time before i myself remembered about this blog. I have been busy creating another one at http://www.kalkitech.com/iec61850. However it did not look good that a blog can be in the company website and that is when i re-discovered this blog.
Anyway, much water has flowed since this blog was started. IEC 61850 has become a more complete standard, there seems to be a general consensus on IEC 61850 across the Atlantic, even though the adoption levels vastly differ. A great news in adoption has been the enthusiasm shown by developing countries like India / China.
However, the big news is the efforts at the standardization level to find new meaning and use for the standard from being a standard and model within the substation to expanding its scope, depth and breadth across substations and trying to integrate with old and new standardization efforts in other committees. However, i am sure there are differing views on this and hope to see some discussion on this here.
Anyway, much water has flowed since this blog was started. IEC 61850 has become a more complete standard, there seems to be a general consensus on IEC 61850 across the Atlantic, even though the adoption levels vastly differ. A great news in adoption has been the enthusiasm shown by developing countries like India / China.
However, the big news is the efforts at the standardization level to find new meaning and use for the standard from being a standard and model within the substation to expanding its scope, depth and breadth across substations and trying to integrate with old and new standardization efforts in other committees. However, i am sure there are differing views on this and hope to see some discussion on this here.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)