My interim CMM colleagues have not been using this blog, but that doesn’t mean nothing has happened. It has been a long while since last blog entry and for now I’ll focus upon present status.
We have been “slipped a pole” on delivery of annual CIM information model releases. A combination of factors caused this and it may have been unrealistic to expect we could achieve nice clean annual delivery of standards. There are interoperability tests (IOP’s) and real world projects that tend to drive things more than any standards body discussions or high minded goals of delivery cycles. I definitely think it is the right decision to be more goal focused instead of just doing annual releases, but it complicates our nice clean CMM role rotation. Anyway, I have assumed the UML model management role and coordinating the weekly WG13 issues meetings since late January and am beavering away at cleaning up remaining issues in the “CIM15” release.
The “CIM15” or more precisely the IEC61970cim15v15 UML package was “frozen” in the January WG13 meeting. Here “frozen” means we won’t do things that break existing profiles unless there is a very serious issue. This was really started at the October 2010 combined WG13+WG14 meeting where there was backlash on changing a few names. So we are doing a bit better job at not breaking implementations. The CIM15 IEC 61970-301 doc will go out later this year.
At the same time we are fixing critical problems (mostly omissions) and are up to iec61970cim15v21 as of today. Most of the changes have been in the “Dynamics” package that came from EPRI work and has been used by ENSO-E in preliminary IOP’s last year. We also added some new primitive types like “Date”, “DateTime”, “Time”, “Duration”, and “Decimal”. These are needed to more precisely map to XSD based messages and to properly represent financial data without round off errors. We have been addressing issues for the upcoming ENTSO-E IOP (July) and for the WG14 IOP in late March.
A big trend coming now is a move from focus on information model to focus on profiles. This has been a somewhat challenging transition and will continue over the next year at least. Part of the “pole slip” is due to this where in 2009 and 2010 years the focus was much more on profiles than on advancing the information model. We are still learning how to best manage this and there are not any really good examples or textbooks we can follow.
There may also be a more formal recognition that CIM is used for standard messages as well as for enterprise integration scenarios as a Canonical Data Model (CDM). This seems to be a trend and usage that may have been under appreciated in the standards bodies.
We expect an IOP of “CIM15” this summer but there are no firm plans and it is getting fairly late. There is planned to be a new 61970-452 CPSM (CIM power system model) profile this spring to support the ENTSO-E IOP if nothing else. Some minor changes to 61970-456 (solution exchange) profiles will occur as well.
The most dramatic development in the information model last year has been the introduction of new transformer models which are not completely new or different, but a significant change. These changes enable combined transmission distribution models, balanced or unbalanced representation and ability to use the same model (both instance and meta data) to represent both types of systems. That may not be clear, but it’s the key enabler to avoid every backend having to keep mappings of how transmission models link into (or overlap with) distribution models. It also allows unbalanced analysis on the transmission system to be layered on instead of having to simply use a completely new more detailed model. Much of the credit on the new transformer model goes to WG14.
The IEC61968 has had a huge amount of work in preparation for the upcoming March IOP’s and the maturity of those models is greatly increased. A lot of things were made “informative” or simply removed to make way for this maturity.
The IEC62325 model has also matured to support EU markets and this year the North American models are poised to also move forward with much the same process used by WG13 and WG14.
There is a full day CIM panel session at IEEE PSCE in Phoenix week of March 21.
I’ll say more on “CIM16” plans in a future blog entry, but for now CIM16 is on hold until we finish preparations for the upcoming IOP’s. Be sure to use the CIM issues if you have questions or identify problems.
Kendall Demaree
