A critical comparison of approaches to resource name management within the IEC Common Information Model

Electricity network resources are frequently identified within different power systems by inhomogeneous names and identities due to the legacy of their administration by different utility business domains. The IEC 61970 Common Information Model (CIM) enables network modeling to reflect the reality of multiple names for unique network resources. However this issue presents a serious challenge to the integrity of a shared CIM repository that has the task of maintaining a resource manifest, linking network resources to master identities, when unique network resources may have multiple names and identities derived from different power system models and other power system applications. The current approach, using CIM 15, is to manage multiple resource names within a singular CIM namespace utilizing the CIM “IdentifiedObject” and “Name” classes. We compare this approach to one using additional namespaces relating to different power systems, similar to the practice used in CIM extensions, in order to more clearly identify the genealogy of a network resource, provide faster model import times and a simpler means of supporting the relationship between multiple resource names and identities and a master resource identity.