A multi‐version CIM‐based database platform for smart grid

Abstract

In the smart grid area, the Common Information Model (CIM) for energy management systems is widely used. CIM is developed in a Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its entire content is maintained with one version by the IEC TC57 committee. There are officially four versions of CIM so far. For each CIM entity modeled in UML, such as a class or an attribute, there is no version information by default. This makes it extremely difficult to precisely identify a CIM entity in an application. Consequently, any application utilizing CIM faces an obstacle in maintenance and in exchange of data with other parties that may be utilizing different versions of CIM. Furthermore, CIM in UML format is unsuitable for managing a large number of instances. In order to improve the above‐mentioned compatibility and usability problem of CIM, in this paper we introduce a new International Standard, IEC 62656‐3. Through this standard, CIM can be decomposed into a set of tabular data each of which has an explicit version and can be described with a spreadsheet. This format is called Parcellized‐CIM. Based on Parcellized‐CIM, a commercial database platform, Parcimoser, is developed and applied in the engineering of smart grids. © 2015 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.