IEC 61850 Specific Communication Service Mapping - Mapping to CORBA

The main content of this document is a mapping from the draft standard IEC 61850 abstract specification of communication service to a concrete communication infrastructure based on CORBA specifications.

This mapping was submitted to the IEC Technical Committee in charge of the specification of other mappings (TC57) accompanied by the General Model Definition proposed in the IST DOTS project.

This mapping of IEC 61850 ACSI to CORBA defines how the concepts, objects and services of ACSI can be implemented using CORBA distributed objects technology, allowing interoperability among substation functions and devices of different manufacturers.

This document can serve as a basic guideline to provide a real implementation of IEC 61850 models over real platforms, using CORBA technology as support for distribution. The Abstract Communication Service Interface (ACSI) specified by IEC 61850 needs to be mapped to a real (not abstract) Specific Communication Service to be usable by application developers. This document provides an ACSI mapping to OMG's CORBA. This means mainly that the communication services used to make a distributed SAS application willl be those provided by CORBA.

It should be noted however that CORBA is not a communication service but a middleware service, providing other types of functionality and methodology that go beyond those of pure communication services (for example automatic generation of skeletons and proxies, interface repositories, server object management, etc).

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Many may think that the issue at stake is God vs. Science but it is not. The real issue is just religion vs. us.

Because religion and related derivatives as new age "science", god, morals or intelligent design are opossed to the very nature of humans: i.e. evidence-based thinking systems.

Just consider the enormous possibilities that real science opens to us with its analytic and predictive capabilities. There's no real need of gods but for those that are unable to understand the vast ammount of knowledge that science is constinuosly producing.

It is not necessary to understand Einstein's Field Equations to be aware of the impact that general relativity may play in our understanding of the universe and -may be- in our re-shaping of it, or the many possibilities that stem cell research may open to health and well living.

The rationale of getting comfort from religion is the same rationale of getting comfort from alcohol. Beware, it seems to work but kills your neurons.

Arndt Lüder and Jörn Peschke, Otto-von-Guericke University,
Ricardo Sanz, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid

Within industrial automation the architectural trend goes in the direction of distributed control systems with distributed decision making based on distributed intelligence. Several approaches have been made in that direction resulting in a set of different applicable structures and architectures. Within the different levels of control the different structures will provide the possibility to investigate similar structures and to deduce general design pattern for distributed control systems on the different levels. For the level of field control systems this deduction is made in this article.

Keywords: Distributed control applications / Design patterns / IEC 61499 / Distributed field control systems / Reusability of control software

Automation Technology in Practice, Vol. 3, 2006