Efficient commissioning and operation utilizing analogies between electrical

drawings and SCL files

Burak Tahincioglu - OMICRON electronics GmbH Austria
burak.tahincioglu@omicronenergy.com

1 Introduction
Having a well-designed secondary project is considered as a key element for a substation. Secondary
schematics consist of many subparts including single line diagram (SLD), electrical overview, cable
diagram, wiring diagram, terminal plan, connection list and so on.

Traditionally, commissioning of protection, automation, and control systems (PAC) during site acceptance
testing (SAT) starts with marking all pages of the secondary project to ensure both ends of the cables are
terminated at correct locations designated on the project.

These activities are based on visual checks, basic electrical continuity tests and analogue injection applied
to the circuits. Finally, observing the displays, LEDs, alarms or simply witnessing the correct functioning of
the devices completes the “functional test” part of commissioning activities.

There are many concepts applied to secondary projects to keep the running PAC system representing an
exact replica of the secondary project, even after substation is exposed to modifications and extensions.
When the transition from paper drawings to IEC 61850 system configuration language (SCL) data started,
it is observed that a lot of useful electrical drawing concepts which similarly exists in SCL is often not
engineered.

The traditional approach of utilities during tendering stage of a substation is specifying the requirements in
written format, and as a result contractor shall deliver electrical projects for approval, matching these
specifications. Throughout the years, utilities have been continuously updating their specifications to
include more and more information in the electrical projects to gain the optimum benefit. The more
information included in the projects, the more efficient commissioning and operation experience is
expected.

A challenge to tackle during digital transformation journey would be to develop a new specification and
project approval concept for transferring maximum information included in electrical drawings to the
machine-readable SCL data.

In the following sections of the article, the similarities between electrical drawings and SCL files and some
of the important features of electrical drawings that can be implemented to SCL to increase efficiency for
commissioning and operation is discussed.

2 Analogies between electrical drawings and SCL files

Some years ago, electrical drawings started to be drawn using computer aided design (CAD) software
instead of hand drawing. Another step forward was witnessed with using intelligent design software which
automatically generates wiring and cabling diagrams out of electrical schematics. Both developments had
an impact on reducing the human errors and decreased the duration of project preparation significantly.

Even though the improvements described above eased the project design process, while switching from
hard wired substations to IEC 61850 based substations, another challenge is introduced. The information
included in electrical drawings is required to be transferred to IEC 61850 SCL file. Below some analogies
are described to establish a relationship between electrical drawings and SCL file.
2.1 Single Line Diagram - Substation Section

SLD gives an overview about the switchgear characteristics, busbar arrangement and electrical
connections of the substation. From protection and control point of view, it is the basis for allocating
protection functions and generating interlocking logics. Therefore, it is a common practice to include SLD
as one of the first pages in electrical drawings.

IEC 61850-6 refers to IEC 81346 regarding the reference designations for naming structural substation
elements [5]. SCL file follows a similar order like electrical drawings about SLD. It starts with <Substation>
section. In substation section, the hierarchical elements can be defined with the tags <Substation>,
<VoltageLevel>, <Bay>, <ConductingEquipment>, <SubEquipment>, <Terminal>, <ConnectivityNode>.
The exact location of the equipment can be specified according to the coordinates. For this purpose, SCL
allows using <sxy: x> and <sxy: y> coordinate tags.

An example SLD is given below in figure 1, and how a testing tool visualizes the same SLD without busbar
connections (zero line diagram - ZLD) upon an SCL import is shown in figure 2.

Figure 1