CIGRE, the International Council for Large Electrical Systems, is an entity established in 1921, based in Paris, aiming to create a community to share information in this area of knowledge.

To fulfil this goal, this organisation is divided into 16 study committees, corresponding to the same number of areas of work. In each study committee, there are several working groups, which purpose is to respond to current and future challenges related to power systems, based on the experience of their members. There are about 250 working groups spread across the various study committees.

One of these working groups, the B5.68, which belongs to the study committee B5 (protection and automation), intends to study the optimization of the engineering process (device configuration) and respective tools for systems based on the IEC 61850 communication standard.

The convener of this group, Camille Bloch, also integrates the team of the OSMOSE European project, namely, in the ‘interoperability' task, that gathered at R&D Nester last November, for another project meeting.

Leveraging the presence of the convener and other members of B5.68, R&D Nester hosted a meeting of this working group, taking into account that the scope of the B5.68 and the OSMOSE task are similar.

In addition to the meeting itself, members of this working group had the opportunity to visit the R&D Nester laboratory, learning about the projects being implemented in this infrastructure.

The IEC 61850 standard, published in 2004, is now widely used by electrical distribution and transmission companies to support communication in the protection, automation and control systems of their substations.

This standard is under permanent evolution (it is in its second edition), existing several working groups exploring and improving their capabilities and proposing new areas of application.