Bruce Muschlitz served as the principal investigator for this project to validate the TVA IEC 61850 conformance test suite. The TVA Bradley County substation project successfully intergrated IEC 61850 products from various manufacturers.

This extends previous work by EnerNex to create a set of TVA-specific tests aimed to ensure that substation projects based upon the Bradley County substation would function as planned.

The tests assume that individual devices have passed the UCA International Users Group tests and extends these tests in three areas:

• Individual IED tests to exercise TVA-specific functionality
• Pair-wise testing to ensure well-defined communication between devices
• System and performance testing - ensure entire ensemble of devices meets communication and performance goals

This testing began after the Bradley County substation energization and is designed to determine whether any latent defects remain in the system even after commissioning tests have been performed. The tests first verify that each 61850-based IED type function as expected for and extended set of configurations. The tests then move towards verification of inter-device communications such as client-server and subscriber-publisher (GOOSE) communications. Verification of timing parameters is also performed. The final set of tests ensures that the entire system inter-operates with extended control and monitoring.