Sensors
2022
,
22
, 2475
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5. Software Implementation
The proposal presented here was developed inside a research project named PASCAL;
details of the project are given in the Funding section.
The research project featured the implementation of a prototype of the IEC 61850 Web
Platform according to the architecture depicted by Figure
4
; furthermore, the prototype
was tested in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal. The aim of this section is
to provide an overview of the software implementation choices and the details of the tests
carried out.
The software implementation of the IEC 61850 Web Platform was based on the Java
language.
For the Web User authentication, the standard JSON Web Token was used [
29
].
The Spring Boot framework [
30
] was used for the creation of the Web Service Interface
shown by Figure
4
.
The IEC 61860 Client inside the Middleware was implemented using the open-source
library iec61850bean [
31
].
The conversions from SCL to JSON performed by the Middleware, as described in
Section
4
, were realized through the package available in [
32
], and encoders/decoders were
implemented in Java.
XAMPP v3.2.4 was adopted for the local SCL Repository inside the Middleware [
33
].
The MQTT Broker was realized using Mosquitto 1.6.12 [
34
]. The implementation of the
MQTT Publisher inside the Middleware was realized using Eclipse Paho Java Client [
35
].
As noted previously, in order to perform a validation of the software implementation
of the IEC 61850 Web Platform, several tests on real scenarios have been carried out.
The industrial partners of the PASCAL project provided access to IEC 61850 Servers that
maintain information collected by real distributed energy resources (DERs). The IEC 61850
Web Platform implemented by the authors was used to realize the access to these servers, as
described in Section
4
. The industrial partners made a huge number of tests, requesting the
access to specific data maintained by the servers, and comparing the data acquired through
the platform with the real data stored in the servers. All the tests indicated the capability
of the prototype to access the actual information maintained by the servers. Similar tests
were conducted in the opposite direction to update data maintained by the server from the
web. In this case, all the tests also indicated that the platform was able to guarantee the
consistency of the updated information.
All of the conducted tests confirmed that the platform allowed interoperable access by
a web application to the information maintained by IEC 61850 Servers.
