Wide area monitoring using Common Information Model and Sensor Web

Real-time monitoring of power systems has become a reality with the use of phasor measurement units (PMU). Wide-area monitoring of the power system in a de-regularized world requires neighboring utilities' to share data with each other. Sharing data is a difficult process as different utilities use different software applications that store data in their own proprietary data-formats. To minimize the data format constraints, EPRI (U.S. Electric Power Research Institute) developed the Common Information Model (CIM) for power systems. Using CIM as a common format for data from different utilities, the disparate applications can work together. Further, these CIM data can be stored in a data concentrator application like sensor Web that obtains these messages from different utilities and sorts and stores them in a central repository. The data from this repository can be used to perform tasks like state estimation and contingency analysis.