Scope

No component implements IEC 61850. There is no MMS client, no GOOSE subscriber, no sampled values, no SCL or CID handling and no logical node data model. The package contains no network layer.

IEC 61850 is referenced in one place: the sequence of events screen, which displays an SOE record of a feeder trip. The claim made there is a narrow one and is stated exactly below, because "IEC 61850 support" would be a different claim.

The claim concerns timestamp resolution only.

Timestamp resolution

IEC 61850 defines time synchronisation performance classes, from T1 at 1 ms through T3 at 25 µs to T5 at 1 µs, because protection events occur faster than a millisecond clock can separate them. A record whose timestamps cannot order two events cannot answer the question asked of it: what caused what.

Smart.Utilities.DateTime, the date type of the framework under the components, stores microseconds and nanoseconds as separate fields instead of as a fraction of a millisecond, so a T3, T4 or T5 timestamp can be held, sorted, formatted and displayed without losing its low-order digits. The claim is this: the display layer does not degrade the record it is given.

The screen demonstrates the effect. A feeder trip takes about twelve milliseconds across five sources: a merging unit, the feeder relay, a breaker-failure relay, the circuit breaker and SCADA. The toggle truncates the same record to 1 ms, and thirteen of the fourteen events then share timestamps: the order of events is lost, and the record cannot show whether the breaker opened because the relay tripped or because the backup operated.

Quality

IEC 61850 attaches a quality attribute to every value: validity, detail bits and a source indication. The SOE screen displays a simplified quality per event, and smart-faceplate carries good, uncertain, bad and stale and includes the quality in the spoken value, so a reading that is not reliable is not presented as a live one.

This quality model follows OPC rather than IEC 61850. It is a presentation convention that an application can map its own quality model onto. It is not the IEC 61850 quality type, does not carry the detail bits, and should not be presented to an auditor as an implementation of it.

Known limitations

  • No protocol. No MMS, GOOSE, R-GOOSE or sampled values. Events reach the screen because the application supplied them.
  • No time synchronisation. The components display the timestamps they are given. They have no clock, no PTP and no IRIG-B, and cannot know whether the source clock was synchronised. The performance class is a property of the IEDs and the time distribution, not of this software.
  • No TimeQuality modelling. IEC 61850 timestamps carry leap-seconds-known, clock-failure and clock-not-synchronised flags. None of these is represented, so a screen cannot show that a timestamp is unreliable for clock reasons. This is a known gap for an SOE viewer.
  • No SOE component. The sequence of events screen is a template built from a table, not a packaged component. There is no smart-soe.
  • Format string note. In Smart.Utilities.DateTime format strings, a three-character run repeats the field: uuu is parsed as uu followed by u and prints 456 as 456456. Use one or two characters per field. The screen uses HH:mm:ss.fff uu.

Related: 21 CFR Part 11 and GAMP 5, which covers the same timestamp property from the audit trail side.