Overview of CIM-oriented database design and data exchanging in power system applications

Historically, databases in power systems were designed for certain applications and not oriented to information-sharing. The isolation among power system applications' databases hinders the development of a universal information infrastructure in the power system industry. To accommodate the trend of software development, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRl) Working Group on Control Center Application Interfaces has published a standard data model-common information model (CIM) in IEC standard 61970. An overview of all the models is introduced. A central CIM database is proposed in this standard for large amount of common data-sharing among applications. Accordingly, conventions and procedures used to translate the CIM specification into a workable, "real-world" relational database are reaching maturity. EPRI also decided to use extensible markup language (XML) in resource descriptive frame (RDF) as the format for exchanging CIM data in power system applications and databases. This paper presents an overview of the CIM data models for power systems, the CIM implementations in database design, and the data exchange format for the applications.