IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016 - 27

cIm is designed and targeted to address
big data integration issues and provides
the means to readily capture, correlate,
maintain and communicate this information for current and future uses, where
many future uses are not yet known.
The third article, "optimizing operations with cIm," will take you deeper into
the network analyses that rely on a lot of
data. The size of models coupled with
changing power grid conditions alone
would make the maintenance of accurate models a significant challenge,
but, in addition, the data required to
produce models for any given analysis
always come from multiple organizational sources. The cIm approach to
network models is to design modular
data such that each logical part of the
overall data can be supplied from its
natural source and reliably plugged together with parts from other sources to
make the different kinds of analytical
models required in today's grid. The
article outlines the architecture behind
the cIm network building blocks and
the implementations in ercoT and
enTSo-e as showcases to promote
cIm advantages such as cost reduction, speeding up of complex processes, and reduction of the potential for
errors. It is important that the cIm is
implemented correctly to free valuable
engineering time for network analyses
rather than data management. ePrI's
work on the topic has shown how a
utility may benefit from a unilateral
adoption of the cIm, concentrating
on unifying the various case building
activities within the utility's operations
and planning responsibilities.
The cIm has already extended
far beyond its roots as a definitive
standard for power assets to now
being used for distribution, energy
markets, dynamics, weather, and integration of utility applications. cIm
standards enable the acquisition and
integration of data from a variety of
sources and time frames, as required
by utility analytics to operate the grid
close to capacity. This is the topic
of the fourth article, "making Distribution automation Work," which
highlights the value that the cIm

provides as a semantic standard and the
value that comes from not having to start
from scratch each time a new use case
is explored, but instead leveraging previous work. as the authors state, the cIm
will stop changing only when the utility
industry stops innovating.
The purpose of the fifth article, "under the hood," is to explain how the cIm
can be used to generate exchange packages and how those packages enable an

integration framework. an overview of
different standards and the basics of the
well-established model (the cIm) are
presented, which provides the common
semantics used to generate standard and
custom profiles for use in data exchange
and enterprise integration. The cIm
profiling approach, explained in the article, makes the definition of exchange
payloads consistent, where both producers and consumers agree upon meaning.
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine - January/February 2016
