A Common Information Model Oriented Graph Database Framework for Power Systems

Common Information Model (CIM) is widely adopted by many utilities since it offers interoperability through standard information models. Storing, processing, retrieving, and providing concurrent access of the large power network models to the various power system applications in CIM framework are the current challenges faced by utility operators. As the power network models resemble largely connected-data sets, the design of CIM oriented database has to support high-speed data retrieval of the connected-data and efficient storage for processing. The graph database is gaining wide acceptance for storing and processing of largely connected-data for various applications. This paper presents a design of CIM oriented graph database (CIMGDB) for storing and processing the largely connected-data of power system applications. Three significant advantages of the CIMGDB are efficient data retrieval and storage, agility to adapt dynamic changes in CIM profile, and greater flexibility of modeling CIM unified modeling language (UML) in GDB. The CIMGDB does not need a predefined database schema. Therefore, the CIM semantics needs to be added to the artifacts of GDB for every instance of CIM objects storage. A CIM based object-graph mapping methodology is proposed to automate the process. An integration of CIMGDB and power system applications is discussed by an implementation architecture. The data-intensive network topology processing (NTP) is implemented, and demonstrated for six IEEE test networks and one practical 400 kV Maharashtra network. Results such as computation time of executing network topology processing evaluate the performance of the CIMGDB.