Customer References – Xelas Energy

61850 Client and Server Simulators

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power provides its 666,000 water customers and 1.4 million electric customers with quality utility services. Its 194 distribution and transmission substations are gradually automated based on IEC 61850.

The Xelas 61850 GOOSE Simulator is optimized to provide full 61850 functionality on embedded systems. The Xelas embedded application platform provides a rapid portation layer called Jupiter that significantly reduces portation time to proprietary RTOSs like ARTOS. The fully implemented 61850 ACSI interface API provides for rapid application development compared to regular MMS protocol libraries.

Using the Xelas Energy IEC 61850 GOOSE Simulator, LADWP implemented a GOOSE test bed within 2 months. Having the GOOSE Simulator available on a portable laptop will save LADWP the expense of buying 11 voltage testers, each of which cost around $80,000. Total project savings $750,000.

Implementation of the embedded IEC 61850 embedded client with MMS was completed in 6 weeks. The LADWP engineers previously worked with other IEC 61850 tools and stated that the Xelas software tools provided as much as a 50% improvement in time and cost savings.

61850 Conformance Testing

Pulsetech is a dedicated 61850 Chinese technical integrator-testing company, with services for industry and network companies.

The Xelas Energy Client Simulator including GOOSE, MMS and SV is implemented by Pulsetech for its customer China XD Xihari. Xihari operates a high voltage apparatus laboratory, located within Xi’an High Voltage Apparatus Research Institute (XIHARI), Xi’an, China, which is the largest high power, high voltage testing and research base in China with more than 100 staff members. Xihari will use the Xelas 61850 simulators to build an advanced 61850 Conformance Test Lab.

Xelas may in a later stage also provide its full script driven conformance test suite. This fully distributed suite automates client- and server functional testing and conformance testing to a high extend, reducing lab- and project acceptance costs and time. Competitive test suites are far more expensive and less open in system architecture. Xelas also provides training to local staff.

61850 Simulators and Conformance Test-Suite

61850 Simulators

ATOP in Taiwan, China provides industrial communication solutions to its industrial and energy network customer base. ATOPs portfolio includes industrial Ethernet switches, gateways, protocol convertors etc. As many other competitors in this field, they are adding IEC 61850 protocols on top of Ethernet, or next to Modbus and/or serial ports.

ATOP uses the Xelas Client- and Server simulators for MMS, Goose and SV. These tools helps its 50+ engineers to develop, test and speed up their IEC protocol integrations.

ATOP IEDs need to be formally conformance tested which is time-consuming and expensive project. In order to prepare and speed up this certification ATOP uses the Xelas Energy 61850-10 Conformance Test-Suite to pre-validate its devices.

The Xelas Tools discussed above increases the efficiency and productivity of ATOP’s engineers and has helped them to further structure their development process.

IEC 61850 embedded MMS client

Locamation is a leading dedicated substation automation vendor, located in the Netherlands. Its system SASensor® is a widely adopted centralised Protection and Control (CPC) system for primary substations, with more than 4 million hours of reliable use in the field.

The Locamation sensor system interfaces directly with any type of equipment, and needs to regularly communicate with IEC 61850 substation equipment. For this reason, they needed an internal 61850 client, embedded on their own OS. Xelas provided both the off-the-shelf libraries and the full porting services for an embedded MMS client. The system is currently under long term duration tests of Fortum, one of Locamation’s DSO customers.

Locamation engineers have worked with competitor software earlier. The Xelas embedded software libraries provide a dedicated layer for the binding with embedded OS systems, which allows far easier integration. Due to this feature, the Xelas implementation was at least 50 % faster and cheaper. Locamation plans to use Xelas for various addition 61850 features.

IEC 61850 embedded Sampled Values Subscriber

IEC 61850 Sampled Values subscriber.

Asu Bhanu (www.asabhanu.com) delivers technical services to its utility and industry customers.

For their customer Meppi they proposed to monitor multiple currency transformers, using IEC-61850 Sampled Values methodology.

Multiple currency transformers were connected to merging unit. Each merging unit is able to generate 4800 sampled value messages/second.

Six merging unit are connected to a Mitsubishi PLC, using a Intel-Atom SH-4A processor.

The Xelas 61850 embedded development toolkit was used to rapidly develop a sampled-values subscriber, receiving the messages from the six merging units, so able to handle at least 6*4800 is 28.800 messages/second.

During testing, the application proved to support this traffic continuously, still leaving some system-resources and bandwidth free.