POWER INFO

CIMSpy EE is a CIM-based data engineering tool designed to address the emerging information integration and management requirements in the power industry. Built as a distributed Web-based enterprise application, CIMSpy EE provides a set of infrastructure and application modules that can be assembled or configured to meet the project needs in various CIM-based application areas, ranging from standard-based model exchange, single-entry modeling, to visualization of power system model and operating conditions. For a quick introduction to the tool, check the : CIMSpy EE Brochure.

 

Background

CIMSpy started as a hobby open-source project in 2005. The early version, i.e. CIMSpy Standard Edition (CIMSpy SE), was designed to support EPRI's InterOP (IOP) tests. Since the introduction, it has been widely used in the CIM communities, including the past four IOPs. Many of the new features were added to the tool based on the feedback from the CIM communities. However when using the tool to browse and validate the real-world CIM models, users identified many limitations of the tool, including performance, scalability, and extensibility, etc.

 

Driven by the key requirements of some CIM-related projects in North America and Europe, CIMSpy was rebuilt in 2008 to overcome the identified limitations. The enhanced version, CIMSpy Enterprise Edition (CIMSpy EE), leveraging the greatest and latest technologies, delivers industry leading performance and comprehensive data engineering features addressing the common requirements of CIM-related projects.

 

Today, CIMSpy EE and its derived tools are used by vendors, utilities, RTO/ISOs, and grid coordination organizations in North America and Europe. In May 2011, US Department of Energy (DOE) awarded Power Info LLC an innovation grant in support of the continuous reseach on data-driven visualization of power grid, one of the key features of CIMSpy EE.

 

Case Study

Unlike CIMSpy SE which is a standalone application, CIMSpy EE is fundamentally a tool framework designed to support built-to-fit tooling. It provides an open architecture and a rich set of functional modules to support a specific CIM-related project. Typically a customization process is required to derive a specific tool to meet special needs of the supported projects. For example, Power Info LLC has delivered the CIM data engineering solution kit (CIMdesk) to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) and its 42 Transmission System Operator (TSO) members in 34 European countries. CIMdesk was built on the top of CIMSpy EE. More specifically, CIMSpy EE was customized to support the CIM profile and model merging business processes specifically designed to support model exchange among ENTSO-E and its TSO members.

 

If you are interested in deriving a data engineering tool from CIMSpy EE to support your CIM-related projects, please contact us at info@powerinfo.us. You can also chose to leverage one of the existing out-of-the-box tools derived from CIMSpy EE. Just recently, ENTSO-E has authorized Power Info LLC to license CIMdesk under mutually-agreed terms. As a thrid option, you can license the function modules of CIMSpy EE, such as CIM validation module or CIM visualization module, and plugin or embed them into your products.

 

Compared with CIMSpy SE, CIMSpy EE delivers the following additional features and enhancements:

 

Rich Model Browsing User Experience

CIMSpy EE provides comprehensive features and rich use experience to support model browsing. It organizes the flat CIM/XML into various model hierarchies, enabling users to explore the loaded CIM models from different perspectives and in different formats ranging from tabular displays to graphical displays. The tool provides a variety of mechanisms to support the navigations among these displays and many other features to facilitate the model browsing, including searching by rdf:ID and name, locating the instance under various model hierarchies, filtering objects based on the defined criteria, and creating multiple views to browse models in parallel, etc.

 

 

Industry Leading Performance & Scalability

CIMSpy SE was initially built to support the InterOP tests. The test CIM/XML files used in the InterOPs normally contain 200-1000 ConnectivityNodes and are less than 10MB in size. A practical CIM/XML model file, however, can exceed 1GB in size. While CIMSpy SE could successfully load large CIM/XML model files up to 600 MB and containing more than 36,000 ConnectivityNodes, the responsiveness of many functions, include navigation, searching, and validation, is significantly degraded. To boost the performance of the tool, many of the core functions have been reengineered so that the enhanced tool could respond to the size of loaded model in a scalable manner. To achieve this goal, we reengineered the enhanced version of the tool by designing the memory-efficient RDB-compliant data structures to store the model and indexing the loaded CIM object model for quick information retrieval and navigation. The conducted tests have shown the CIMSpy EE can load CIM/XML files of GB size at a speed of 300-400MB/min on a middle-end PC. The amount of time used to call an instance display in CIMSpy EE is about 0.2 seconds regardless of the model size. The performance and scalability have been tremendously improved in CIMSpy EE.

 

 

 

Support of CIM Extension and Customization

CIM is still evolving. Almost every CIM-related project requires standard CIM to be extended to meet special project requirements. CIMSpy SE, designed for InterOPs, supports only standard CIM, i.e. IEC 61970-301/61970-552-4. CIMSpy EE, however, fully supports CIM extensions, including browsing and validation of extended CIM models. The enhanced tool is generic, driven by any profiles derived from standard CIM. The domain-specific modeling knowledge, including schema, modeling restrictions, and validation rules, etc, is specified in a profile meta-file, rather than hard-coded in the software. This metadata-driven architecture makes it extremely easy to maintain and extend the tool.

 

Distributed Web Deployment

Built as a distributed Web application, CIMSpy EE makes your CIM information and services available anytime and organization wide via Intranet or secured Internet connections. All you need to do is typing the URL assigned to a version of a model on your Web browser. The distributed deployment also facilitates the CIM model management and information sharing. By leveraging powerful server, CIMSpy EE basically can deal with any size of model. The tool can also be easily configured as a desktop application installed on any Windows-based PCs or laptops.

 

Graphical Editing

One of the key design goals of CIMSpy EE tool framework is supporting CIM-based single-entry modeling and centralized information management. Designed as a distributed Web application, CIMSpy EE can be connected to your CIM-compliant database and serve as a model maintenance tool. Users can modify or edit the model using CIMSpy EE and submit the model change in CIM incremental format to update the centralized CIM data depository.

 

CIMSpy EE delivers rich user experience addressing a variety of common power system modeling requirements. Unlike many traditional modeling tools which mainly serve as data entry wizards or database editors, CIMSpy EE provides a variety of mechanisms to visualize the underlying information model, enforce the modeling constraints, and facilitate model building and maintenance. At its core, CIMSpy EE provides a graphical editor for building and maintaining your power system models. The model visualization facility can auto-generate a graphic layout of system and substation one-line diagram based on the underlying network topology model. Users can adjust the auto-generated diagrams or create new portion of the models by dragging graphical symbols from the tool panel, dropping them to the diagram, and making the connection. All of these rich graphical modeling experiences are delivered through a thin Web-based user interface (UI).

 

To support modeling, CIMSpy EE provides a modeler-oriented logical view to expose the underlying information model in a way familiar to power system modeling engineers. For example, it creates a logical view to combine related fine-granulated CIM objects such as PowerTransformer, TransformerWinding, TapChanger into a reality-based modeling entity such as two-winding transformer. The modeling tool built on the top of CIMSpy EE framework does not require the end users to be CIM-knowledgeable.

 

 

 

Schema-driven and Rule-based CIM Validations

Data validation is one of the most critical functions of any CIM-based information infrastructure. All too often a very carefully designed system that has been designed to provide excellent services is ignored, or actually turned off, because the input data is just not accurate or complete for the results of the function to be trusted, the so called "Garbage in; Garbage out" scenario. CIM validation ensures the CIM-compliant information infrastructure receives the right data in the right format.

 

CIMSpy EE provides both schema-driven and rule-based CIM validations. The former checks the input CIM/XML against the governing schema for standard conformance validation, while the latter validates the model based on a set of pre-defined modeling rules to detect any violations of domain-specific modeling constraints, such as network topology errors and voltage regulation violations, etc. All of the model schema definitions and domain-specific validation rules are specified in a metadata file that drives the validation of the tool. By feeding the tool with your extended CIM schema or profile and declaring your specific validation rules, you will be able to validate the loaded model against the extended CIM schema or profile for compliance checking and domain-specific validation. As model evolves, you can edit the validation rules by adding new rules or modifying the existing ones. The output of the validation is a report that lists all of the detected errors and warnings. The validation report provides a variety of mechanisms to facilitate the model debugging process. For example, a hyperlink is provided for each detected incidence to enable users to navigate to the corresponding object displays to inspect the details for the reported model errors. Users can also sort, group, and filter the detected errors and warnings, etc.

 

             

 

Comprehensive Data Engineering Functions

In addition to model validation, CIMSpy EE also provides a variety of data engineering functionalities to facilitate the model consumption. By defining the filtering criteria in the profile, users can filter out the unneeded information. The model comparison function allows users to compare two versions of the same model. The result of the model comparison is a CIM difference model (or CIM incremental model) highlighting the difference of two versions of the same model. Users can also merge multiple partial models into a single one. partition a single model into multiple partial ones, and apply the incremental update into the base model. The edited/filtered/merged/partitioned/updated/validated models can be further exported into a new CIM/XML file or a collection of CSV files ready for consumption by other CIM-compliant information infrastructures.

 

 

 

CIMSpy EE provides a set of well-defined APIs to enable users to plug-in these functionalities into any CIM-compliant information infrastructure. With minimum integration effort, the tool core infrastructures can be leveraged to provide a variety of off-the-shelf functionalities and services to your CIM information infrastructure no matter whether it is a legacy application or a new cutting-edge solution in a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

 

Interactive CIM Visualization

Information visualization has proved to be one of the effective techniques for meeting the emerging business requirements in today's power industry. It involves visual representation of large-scale collections of information and use of graphical techniques to help people understand and analyze the data. The existing commercial power system visualization tools require the visualizations to be manually-built and restrict the visualization process to follow a limited number of pre-defined patterns created by human designers, thus hindering users’ ability to discover. CIMSpy EE adopts a different approach. Built upon CIM, CIMSpy EE yields the power of visualization to users. A variety of data-driven techniques are applied to auto-generate the high-quality visualization displays, enabling users to visualize the power system’s physical and electrical configurations at various levels and from different perspectives. Furthermore, by leveraging the latest-and-greatest information visualization technologies and open industry standards, CIMSpy EE is aimed to deliver a rich user experience and provide a standard-based visualization solution that can be seamlessly integrated with the existing utility information infrastructure.

 

CIMSpy visualization was designed to support multiple business functions in an electric utility environment. Some of the identified business functions that have been put into practical use include:

 

CIMSpy EE auto-generates various types of one-line diagrams in response to users' queries. For example, a substation diagram can be created, showing the internal configuration within a substation where electric equipments are physically located and interconnected. The displayed equipment connection could be physical or electrical. In the later case, the physical network connection (referred to as node-breaker representation) is simplified as an electrical configuration (called bus-branch representation) based on status of the switching devices. Within a substation, voltage levels can be identified using various colors. Users can inspect the equipment parameters by moving the cursor over the corresponding equipment graphical symbol. A data grid will pop us to display the corresponding equipment parameters in details.

 

 

CIMSpy EE provides a special diagram called neighborhood diagram. It enables users to visualize a selected substation and the connections to its neighboring substations. The purpose of this diagram is to support the model exploration at a substation level. The diagram creation is user-driven. Users can specify the scope of the neighborhood diagrams, such as “displaying all of the neighboring substations that are within two branches”. Furthermore, users can visualize the details of the selected substation through a popup or by navigating to the corresponding substation diagram. Based on users’ suggestion, an interactive feature was later added to enable users to explore the substation neighborhood by expanding the diagram from the selected boundary substation once at a time. This interactive feature enables users to drive the visualization process at a will of their own.

 

 

CIMSpy EE supports the customization of CIM Visualization. Once the one-line-diagram is generated, users can adjust the diagram by dragging and dropping the graphical symbols and labels. A variety of graphical navigation mechanisms are provided to facilitate the manipulation of the generated diagram. Users can zoom in/out the diagram and pan (drag) the whole diagram. Users can also enable/disable the (name) label display, change the color theme or create their own color theme, etc. The user preference settings are automatically persisted.

 

In addition to visualization of network connection, CIMSpy EE is also designed to support visualization of power system operating conditions. Analysis results, such as those from topology analysis and power flow/state estimation study, can be visualized on the top of the generated network diagram. Various animation techniques are applied to help users understand the system operating conditions and alert the users for any contingencies, such as over-limit conditions.

 

 

If the geographical information is contained in the CIM model, CIMSpy EE can display the model information on a geographical map. The following diagram displays a distribution network model on a geographical map. Similiarly, the analysis results of various distribution applications such as network tracing, outage management, and circuit reliability analysis, etc. can be displayed on the geographical diagrams of a distribution circuit.