Common Information Model (CIM) is an effort to develop a common power system network operation model that can be shared and exchanged among different applications across operations and planning between utilities companies or, maybe in the future, power trading companies to facilitate seamless power system information sharing. Being a canonical power system data model, CIM is the foundation to integration of modern information systems in the power industry. We believe that real-time integration of power system applications is not possible without a common data model that can be understood by everyone (human beings as well as computers). CIM has found a lot of applications in the power industry, such as operations and planning. However, when major ISOs (Independent Service Operators) are creating, expanding and maintaining their CIM model, their model, which is used by many regional utility companies, is growing bigger and bigger. For example, the latest ERCOT model is 4.4 GB with more then 2.6M RDF records as of October, 2008. Existing CIM tools have the following issues when it comes to handling large CIM model files: - Existing commercial software packages are expensive, and most small- to mid-size utilities companies can not afford them. And they usually require enterprise relational database software such as Oracle (license fee and support cost). Yet, these expensive packages only achieved a fraction of the performance of InterPSS OpenCIM. See the performance comparison for details.
- Existing commercial software packages require high-end hardware and complicated configurations.
- Existing commercial software packages cannot be easily modified or extended to accommodate enhancement and customer-specific requirements.
- Existing commercial software packages cannot be easily integrated with other power system applications.
InterPSS OpenCIM targets the above issues by providing: - A graphical tool that can show all details of a CIM model, or selectively show only the interested/relevant part.
- A Java-based tool with both GUI and API that could be run on any platform that has Java runtime.
- An innovative RDF parser that parses large RDF model files quickly and efficiently. See the performance comparison for details.
- A flexible architecture model that can adapt quickly to different customized CIM models from different ISOs.
- An OpenCIM API that can be used in any other power system applications in which programmatically managing CIM models is a requirement.
- No need for expensive enterprise relational database software such as Oracle; single and easy installation with Java Runtime Environment (JRE) the only software prerequisite.
- No need for high-end hardware. Parsing and displaying the 4.4 GB CIM model can be done on a professional laptop computer.
- Intrinsic capability to seamlessly Integrate with other power system applications.
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