With the promotion of the smart substation

the existing design and configuration tools for smart substation have been unable to meet the ever-increasing demand of the users. On the basis of summarizing functions of the existing configuration tools

this paper puts forward a tool functional specification for the integration of design and configuration. With reference to several application scenarios of smart substation configuration

the four subsystems involved in the configuration tool are proposed

while details of tool functions are described. Finally

several difficulties in the practice of design and configuration are analyzed and some related solutions are given.