Consulting Services

Standard-Based Utility Enterprise Application Integration

A common problem facing today s power industry is application integration and information management. A power utility company normally maintains a variety of enterprise applications to automate business processes ranging from operation, planning, and construction to management of assets, outages, work, and customers. These legacy applications were typically designed as a discrete business function and provided by different vendors when there were no open standards. As business evolves, electric utility operations may involve multiple business processes across several functional areas. The changing business practices have resulted in a requirement for integration of heterogeneous legacy power system applications inside and outside an electric utility organization.  To address these integration issues common to electric utilities, international standard groups have been working on the specification for interfaces to facilitate the interoperation of electric utility software from independent sources. A significant achievement of this effort is the creation of a Common Information Model (CIM). The purpose of the CIM is to produce standard interface specifications for "plug-in" applications for an electric utility organization. 

Power Info s Utility Integration Framework (UIF) is a standards-based integration platform designed to significantly reduce the engineering effort required to integrate enterprise applications and manage information in the power utility environment. UIF provides an off-the-shelf integration middleware designed to address a variety of specific integration issues in the power industry. More specifically, to facilitate the utility information exchange and management, UIF provides a centralized common information repository and a wide range of data management services. It also provides a SOA-based integration bus using XML messaging per the IEC 61970, 61968, and 61850 standards. UIF fosters collaboration among heterogeneous utility information systems based on the CIM and its related standards and results in an open architecture allowing both the existing legacy applications and the new leading-edge applications to be rapidly and seamlessly integrated into the system. Under this standard-based integration framework, new solutions can be quickly deployed and recomposed to address the changing business conditions. The UIF enables you to build a flexible model-driven architecture for application integration to leverage existing power system application investments.

CIM-Based Model Exchange

CIM is an abstract model that represents all the major power system objects in an electric utility enterprise ranging from generation, transmission, distribution to consumption. One of the major applications of CIM is support of open model exchange. Electric utility organizations have long needed to exchange system modeling information with one another in order to construct simulation environments for power system economics and security analysis. CIM provided a standard-based semantic framework for model exchange. Encoded in XML and specified by CIM/RDF scheme, a power system model of a utility or an application can be seamlessly consumed by any other foreign utilities or applications.  

As a leader in this area, Power Info has helped EMS/MMS vendors import/export the large RTO CIM models to meet their project requirements. We provide the cutting-edge solutions to help clients build extensible, robust, and high-performance CIM importers/exporters. The tools we developed help our clients browse and debug their models effectively.         

Power System Model Design

CIM is incomplete and is still evolving. Almost every CIM-related project requires standard CIM to be extended to meet special project requirements. With strong object-oriented modeling skill, familiarity with CIM, and proficiency in use of various UML modeling tools, we will help you identify the gap between your proprietary information model and CIM, and then build the links to bridge the gaps. Starting from standard CIM, we add extensions on the top of it and create context profiles to meet your special modeling requirements. We also build tools to help you automate the model-driven design process.      

Information Management Services

Information management is the one of the most challenging tasks facing today s power industry. A power utility maintains many heterogeneous information systems. Each system models the power system from its own business logical view, resulting in a diversity of overlapped and sometimes conflicting information models. In addition, the redundant information resides in hundreds of incompatible formats and cannot be systematically managed and synchronized. Power Info provides a rich set of shared information management services to resolve many of these challenging issues, such as naming translation service, information publish/subscribe service, and model validation services, etc. Shared information management services are designed to work with legacy information systems in a loosely-coupled Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

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