Use of the CIM standard for managing assets at the long island power authority

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) requires accurate and accessible data to optimally manage its assets as well as its service providers. From LIPA's perspective of an asset owner and manager, four key performance areas must be considered: technical performance (such as reliability of assets and system), financial performance (cost and revenue), customer satisfaction, and regulatory compliance. Data stemming from each of these areas is interrelated and needs to be understood in the context of the whole. Therefore LIPA prefers vendors and service providers to fit their systems into LIPA's enterprise based upon predefined and well-documented interfaces. To optimize cost and efficiency, these interfaces need to be based on useful industry standards. One such standard is the Common Information Model (CIM), which has been used on several projects in recent years. While these projects have achieved most of their project goals, there is still significant room for improvement regarding company-wide data flow objectives. Consequently, LIPA has recognized that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on company-wide and standards-based data modeling is an essential component of longer term business solution. This paper describes the experience and motivation driving LIPA's data management strategy and the methodology now being employed to implement it, which has at its core a CIM-based Enterprise Semantic Model (ESM).