IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 43

Using the remote reading and control capability,
the utility and the customer can now capture more data
that is more accurate than ever before.
challenge, leaving the integration design to be more of a
mechanical application of specific integration technologies,
such as (but certainly not limited to) Xml and web services.
The existence of the Cim and related standards such as ieC
61968-9 and ieC 61968-100 provide guidance to product
vendors for the development and support of productized
interfaces that can be used for integration. The existence
of productized interfaces then can greatly simplify efforts
related to systems integration, especially if source and target
systems recognize a common set of standards, as would be
the case when vendors leverage the Cim and related standards. while it needs to be recognized that not all products
currently used within the smart meter landscape leverage the
Cim, it still provides significant value, as it defines a common model eliminating the need for other systems to understand proprietary representations of meter information.

CIM Representations
of Smart Meter Information
The Cim has a package named "metering" that was defined
for ieC 61968 to provide the extensions needed for the

Field
Device

Electric Utility
Enterprise
Applications
(e.g., CIS, WMS,
GIS, MDMS)
Operations
Applications
(e.g., OMS, DMS)

integration of metering systems. This has been standardized
by ieC 61968-9 and ieC 61968-11. while there were over
three dozen classes introduced into the Cim for metering,
the key concepts include the following:
✔ enddevice and meter, where end devices are a type of
asset and a meter is a type of end device
✔ reading, which is used to convey the data collected by
a meter, where there is a wide spectrum of information that can be conveyed depending upon the capabilities of the meter
✔ enddeviceevent, which allows a meter or any other
type of end device to report a wide variety of event
types
✔ enddeviceControl, where an end device can be
instructed to perform a wide variety of actions (obviously depending upon the capabilities of the device)
✔ usagePoint, where usage points are reflective of a
physical or virtual location for one or more end devices.
The key to meter readings, end device events, and end
device controls is that each reading, control, or event identifies a type. Because of the wide variety of data that can be

Field
Device

Enterprise Integration
Infrastructure
(e.g., ESB, SOA, ...)
Interapplication
Information Exchanges

Customer
Meter

Customer

PAN
Device
Meter
or
HAN/PAN
PAN
Gateway
Device

Head End
Systems
(Metering,
DRMS,
DERMS)

Customer

Data Warehouses
Interenterprise
Information Exchanges

Field Communications
Using Proprietary or
Standards-Based
Communication
Infrastructures

PAN
Device
Gateway
HAN/PAN/
or
LAN
Controller
DER
DER

Partners
Partner
Applications
(e.g., Weather,
Market)

figure 1. A perspective of the integration problem.
january/february 2016

ieee power & energy magazine

43
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016
