During autumn 2023 our customers requested 3 private training sessions on the IEC 61850 communication in power systems. These sessions gathered 24 participants and each of the courses was led by two instructors from INFO TECH.

In our conference room we set up a training system for demonstration and hands-on execises: 3 protection relays with IEC 61850 server & GOOSE interface and supporting PRP redundancy, a relay with Modbus slave interface connected to the IEC 61850 based network via our IT Gateway module, a simulator of SCADA with the IEC 61850 client interface, INFO TECH testing and simulation tools such as 61850 Avenue toolset, 61850 GOOSE System Viewer, 61850 SCL Runner toolset.

Upon request of our customers the special focus was put on the following topics:

• communication testing of all protocols defined in the IEC 61850 standard,
• communication supervision during the substation system operation,
• SCL based system engineering with creation of an SCD file and configuration of IEDs.

Though, a significant part of the time was dedicated also to the cybersecurity extensions of the IEC 61850 based communication, as specified in the IEC 62351 standard. INFO TECH tool programs together with the prepared set of certificates allowed for an exercise of setting up a secure client-server communication using TLS for encryption and ACSE for authentication.

Our courses collected the following ratings in the evaluation scale from 0 (lowest) to 5 (highest):

Training material rated 4.9

Competence of instructors rated 4.9

Significance to participant's work rated 4.4

Novelty of acquired information rated 4.0

General evaluation of the training rated 4.8

We truly enjoyed running these sessions with particpants so motivated to study and discuss the training issues and give us feedback from their own experience.