COMPARISON OF THE MULTISPEAK® DISTRIBUTION CONNECTIVITY MODEL AND THE IEC COMMON INFORMATION MODEL NETWORK DATA SET

There are two standards for enterprise integration in electric utilities, the MultiSpeak® specification, which is sponsored by the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA), and the Common Information Model (CIM), which is an international standard maintained by Technical Committee 57 (TC57) of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). A number of papers have presented general comparisons of the two standards, but until recently it has not been possible to perform a detailed comparison for specific corresponding profiles of the two standards. MultiSpeak first published a distribution connectivity model exchange specification and tested applications for compliance with that specification in 2001. Currently, MultiSpeak-compatible connectivity data exchange is in operation at dozens of utilities. Working Group 14 (WG14) of TC57, which deals with work processes germane to distribution utilities, has recently defined the NetworkDataSet message that specifies how the CIM can be used to exchange detailed models for distribution engineering analysis. CIM-compatible NetworkDataSet model exchanges are in operation at several utilities. However, until now no analysis has been published on the correspondence between the two models and the potential for development of an automated means for interchange between the power system models supported by the two specifications. This paper will present a comparison of the corresponding power system models and illustrate how such an automated conversion between them could occur. BACKGROUND Both MultiSpeak and CIM are intended to support standards-based inter-application integration. It is assumed by both groups that such integration needs to connect disparate applications that support a variety of databases and different runtime environments. Both groups thus focus on loosely-coupled integration methods using extensible markup language (XML) to encode message payloads. [1, 2, 3] CIM is designed to use a variety of messaging middleware frameworks in order to maximize the flexibility of implementation at utilities that may have a number of different middleware solutions already in place. Thus the CIM message protocol supports a standardized message header using a noun/verb grammar along with a well-defined message payload. In addition to the message-oriented profile, WG14 plans to develop a web services profile for implementation of its interfaces. MultiSpeak also has developed a messaging framework that was based on the CIM approach, but has found that web services implementations are more desirable for the small utility marketplace since small utilities rarely implement messaging middleware. The MultiSpeak messaging framework is still provided as an option in the specification, but currently MultiSpeak interoperability testing only supports web services and nearly all real-time utility implementations of MultiSpeak make use of this technology. Despite these disparities, the two standards are conceptually more similar than different. Since CIM and MultiSpeak both serve the electric utility industry, there is value to sharing information and