Study of Smart Distribution Integration Evolution

Abstract

Nowadays, there are too much data residing in various automation islands independently installed in utilities in the past few years. So utilities are facing two problems: (1) how to integrate these islands and transform these data into meaningful information; (2) how to manage evolution of the integration. The entire integration cant be done in one implementation and hence the integration should have a long term evolution (LTE) plan. And now the industry consensus is that we have to use CIM to facilitate all these integrations. How to deal with this evolution is the most challenging issue. The utility should have plug-in monitoring, control, management and services of their new needs using smart grid standard s of IEC SG3. These standards include IEC 61970/61968 CIM and IEC 61850 which could ensure seamless information exchange. This means that legacy CIM version will be updated to a new version of this evolution, and the changes will be continuing within the integration evolutions. The approach is that we provide a LTE framework for the utility and use Common Source Modeling to customize their 61970/61968 CIM model in identified integration scope. A CIM version manager will deal with different CIM versions for information exchange under the latest CIM version. Some MDA (Model Driven Architecture) based tools will provide code generators to make this updating smoothly and automatically when utility business is changing with new or smart grids requirements.