We concluded the IEC 61850 Working Group meetings last week, which were deemed a success in all regards! We had the pleasure of meeting various stakeholders from the IEC Head Office, including Mr. Charles Jacquemart (TC57 Officer), Ms. Guilaine Fournet (Head of Sales and Business Department), Mr. Peter Godwin (Head of IT strategy and operations), and Mr. Alisdair Menzies (Editing Manager) who shared an insight into the logistical aspects and explained where TC57/WG10 fits into the big picture. It was very enlightening and is one of the perks of having the meeting hosted in Geneva.

From a technical perspective there is lots happening within the various task forces, including the guidelines on the logic modelling (90-11), WAN (90-12), time sensitive networks (90-13), FACTS (90-14), alarm handling (90-18), RBAC (90-19), and redundant systems (90-20). The Working Group is also very close to releasing the next amendment of the core parts of the standard including parts 5, 6, 7-1, 7-2, 7-3, 7-4 and 8-1, which is very exciting.

From our perspective the highlight of the week was our first face-to-face HMI task force meeting that we held. The task force – which has grown in numbers – came to an agreement on some key aspects of this new work item. We discussed the need for this standard (Why?); the scope that will be covered (What?); a future discussions will be focusing on the solution (How?). We tentatively agreed on the document number that will be assigned (IEC 61850-6-2) to this future International Standard, as well as the title, which is currently:

Communication networks and systems for power utility automation – Part 6-2: Configuration description language extensions for human machine interfaces

We are grateful for the new members who have signed up to join to this task force that we’ve been delegated to lead, and it’s NOT too late to join! Our focus for the next few months will be clarifying the scope statement, as well as composing a list of HMI use cases that will help provide guidance to future discussions. If you have ANY HMI uses cases that you would like considered, we encourage you to share them with the Task Force. We will be classifying the use cases as either “configuration”, “functional”, or “other”, and we look forward to your contributions.

A special thank you to the following organizations who had sponsored the Geneva meetings!