De-Mystifying Smart Grid Standards - Common Information Model (CIM)
The “De-mystifying Smart Grid Standards” series started by reviewing new networking specifications - IEEE 802.15.4g, 15.4e, RoLL - part of the end-to-end Smart Grid communications architecture. The adoption of a TCP/IP-based framework for network communications enables Smart Grid applications to develop independently of the lower layers’ evolution and to leverage the standards-based two-way communications capabilities for important benefits such as:
- Load control
- Dynamic pricing
- Outage detection
- Distributed energy resource (DER) control signals
- On-demand read
But TCP/IP does not address the challenges of data representation and exchange within and between Distribution Management Systems such as these Smart Grid domain/sub-domain examples:
- Customer domains
- Business/building Area Networks (BAN)
- Home Area Networks (HAN)
- Industrial Area Networks (IAN)
- Operation domains
- Monitoring
- Control
- Fault management
Considering the Smart Grid’s wide-scale deployment and interoperability requirements, it becomes obvious that the transition from closed or proprietary implementations to open standards must be achieved using the Common Information Model (CIM) to enable better reliability and efficiency. This can be done by:
- Adopting specific standards per element such as ANSI C12.19 - an established standard that defines an electric meter data model and application-layer message format.
- Converging to Common Information Model specifications applicable to multiple domains such as IEC 61968 - open interfaces and messaging standard becoming widely implemented for application-level energy management systems.
Therefore, by choosing to use
- IEC 61968 XML messages as the native format for interchange between head-end and the rest of the utility systems
- A compressed version of those same IEC61968 XML messages as the native format for communication between the head-end and the smart meters themselves.
- Similar IEC 61968 concepts in Smart Energy Profile 2.0 for HAN, carried over the same TCP/IP stack
A complete alignment of stacks in and between domains is now possible for true end-to-end open standards-based Smart Grid communications .
Tags: CIM, IEC, PhyNet-Grid, smart-grid