IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 24

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Imagine a big superstore where you can find anything you
need, such as food, clothing, tools, and books. This can be
easily associated with the cIm, a well-established model in
which you have all data items and their relationships defined.
"Why do I need this well-established model?" you may ask.
The simple answer is the same reason why you need a superstore. Some people were thinking about a large number
of use cases, and they designed the superstore to cover all
your needs. This is the same way the Iec and the community
developing the cIm gathers all use cases and requirements to
package a best-possible version. at that level, the cIm offers
everything and at the same time nothing if you do not know
your use case well. In a similar way, if you enter a superstore
without a clear idea of what is needed, you would perhaps
spend some money but you would not solve the long-term
problem. This is true for cIm data exchanges as well.
To reap the benefits of the cIm, you need to investigate in
which patterns of exchange or profiles, as they call them in the
Iec, your data exchange would fit. It is a high probability that
you will find the recipe for your data exchange. If you want
to cook a meal, you would open a cookbook and write down
what ingredients you need. These are the items you would buy
every time you cook this dish. In cIm standards, the Iec already filters out the minimum things you need from the wellestablished model, and this is used in the profile you are going
to use for certain data exchanges. If you are in the superstore
to buy ingredients for a salad, you would not buy shoes. In addition, the cIm provides you with ways to extend on the data
items you need to exchange. There are no limitations in this
respect. however, it is advisable to propose your extensions to
the Iec so that everybody can benefit by having the cIm support this specific use case. In the superstore context, you can
always go to another shop and buy what you did not find in the
big store. You might also improvise and find your idea brilliant
enough to be proposed to the hypermarket. now I hope you
are convinced that the cIm can be simple if you want it to be!
The maturity of the cIm increased significantly in the last
years. This is due to its usage in many countries (or at least continents) where it has been implemented: europe, north america, South america, africa, asia (where china, India, and
Japan have implementations), australia, and new Zealand. I
am convinced there are multiple places where the cIm is being
implemented. a majority of cIm projects provided feedback to
the Iec, and we all benefit from it. It is worth mentioning that
more r&D projects that deal with data exchange topics should
look at cIm solutions and propose extensions if their use cases
are not covered, rather than inventing parallel approaches and
increasing the chances of interoperability problems.

File Size-Not an Issue
The size of files in cIm-based exchanges is not really a problem. If we take an example of a bus-branch model that has 9,200
nodes, we see a size of 1.8 mb if it is the ucTe aScII data
exchange format. The same model in the PSS/e raw format will
be about 4.6 mb. If we have this exported in the cIm Xml
january/february 2016

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016