3.7 Interoperability, DER Interconnection, and Communication Standards and Technologies

3.7.5 IEC 61970/61968 Common Information Model (CIM) for Transmission and Distribution Applications

The IEC 61970 Common information model (CIM) is a standard developed by the electric power industry to allow power system application software to exchange information about power system components in an electrical network. In particular, it has developed Unified Modeling Language (UML) structures for utility organization information, power system topologies, and market exchange information. It was developed to standardize the information flows among different applications in Energy Management Systems (EMS), primarily at the transmission level. For example an economic production cost model (8760 hours) can export its data to a reliability power flow model with minimal use of manual processes.

CIM can also be used between planning and operations applications. For instance, CIM is being used by ERCOT to exchange the shared transmission network model between operations and planning.  The transmission owners in the ERCOT interchange region share transmission network topology data with ERCOT via CIM compliant data exchanges to ensure that all topology change is reflected in ERCOT’s real time operations model as well as the planning model.  This concept is being studied by EPRI and others for organizational benefits such as reduction of duplicative manual processes conducted by engineering staff.

The IEC 61968 CIM standard for distribution management has focused on the exchange of messages between various distributions applications. It has recently focused on the exchange of messages between Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) head ends and other metering applications, such as meter management and billing. However, it has not yet been widely adopted by distribution planning and operations software vendors or utilities.