Harmonizing IEC 61850 and CIM for connectivity of substation automation

Abstract

A smart grid is an electrical power grid infrastructure for improving efficiency and reliability of power systems. CIM and IEC 61850 are major standards in the smart grid domain for modeling substations and their management. Due to heavy data exchanges between CIM and IEC 61850, the need for harmonizing the standards has emerged as a high priority issue to improve interoperability of involved systems in a smart grid. Among many aspects involved in the harmonization, connectivity, which is concerned with physical connections of equipment, forms the base. In this work, we present an approach for harmonizing the connectivity aspects of CIM and IEC 61850. In the approach, we analyze the models in the standards that are relevant to connectivity and define harmonization principles based upon the analysis. We then build a harmonized model by applying the principles and define transformation algorithms to support automatic transformation of CIM and IEC 61850 to the harmonized model and vice versa. We implemented the transformation using Query/View/Transformation (QVT). To aid application development, we also developed a profiling tool for tailoring the harmonized model to develop a specific energy management system. We demonstrate use of a profiled model by developing a simple SCADA application.