Learning Objectives
- Understand how a lack of compliance testing poses a challenge to CIM-based integration
- Get up to date with efforts to initiate and support compliance testing programs for CIM
- Understand the role of utilities and vendors in testing and measuring compliance
Identifying the Actionability Gap
The CIM users’ community has recognized for many years the need to develop a compliance testing approach. CIM as a family of standards is well accepted due to its robustness, flexibility, and extensibility, but lack of means for certification and testing continues to present a major obstacle to wider CIM adoption. As mentioned earlier, CIM is a reference model; as such, implementation requires interpretation when applied to an integration project within a specific context.
The working groups that support the CIM strive for it to be both backward-compatible and to offer maximum flexibility. This is why, within the CIM, many of the attributes in the CIM are optional. This flexibility is a benefit, but for a more specific business process to be successfully completed, an attribute might be required.
Certification and testing programs are the solution needed to remove ambiguity and reduce confusion – particularly within less mature portions of standards that are open to interpretation or optional. End users (utility IT organizations, systems integrators, and project teams) need to verify that vendor claims are valid and to ensure that system integration costs will capture the benefits made available by standards-based integration. Vendor products that have been certified as compliant with CIM can help utilities reduce costs.
In early 2016 EPRI published a white paper called A Call to Action: Certification Testing for the Common Information Model. EPRI noted that setting appropriate expectations and interpretations of a standard for implementers presents an “actionability” gap within the CIM standards development cycle. EPRI identified test scripts and certification as the missing links and challenged the industry to develop test scripts for key use cases. Test scripts specify the required information for any given interaction between systems to create the predictable and measurable behaviors that can be tested and measured for compliance.
Completing the First CIM Compliance Test
EPRI completed the first CIM compliance testing event in October 2017. EPRI worked with vendors and utility observers to test messages used to support software integration of distributed energy resource management systems (DERMS). This set of messages allows utilities and vendors to integrate in a standardized way, regardless of whether the DERMS is a standalone system, part of an Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS), or a third-party aggregator providing a hosted solution in the cloud. The use case was designed to test compliance with IEC 61968-5: Distributed Energy Optimization.
The EPRI test script includes WSDLs and XSDs that can be used to develop standards-compliant web services. The test script can be used further to test whatever software is developed using the WSDL and XSD artifacts, to ensure that it is in fact compliant with the standard.
For example, utilities can use it to verify vendor claims of standards-compliance when acquiring a Distributed Energy Resources Management System (DERMS) or a Distribution Management System (DMS) that also includes DERMS functionality, or systems that would interface with a DERMS.
After a second round of testing concluded in 2018, EPRI passed on the role of compliance testing and certification to the UCAIUG.
Case Study
Jeff Kimble has made great progress toward his goal of implementing model-driven integration. With a CIM-based enterprise semantic model in place and a number of adapters completed for some quick-win business project, his customers are beginning to see the promise of faster and less costly system roll-outs. The organization’s internal capabilities are maturing, and Jeff can envision the day when model-driven integration is well-understood – something practiced on every project, not just a nice concept.
One thing has been bothering Jeff though. As business leaders bring him into conversations with potential vendors, he often hears claims that software products are “CIM-compliant.” He knows that CIM is a reference model, and that even often-used CIM profiles leave the integration developers with questions.
Jeff learned about an EPRI-sponsored CIM interoperability test and signed up as an observer. He quickly gained new perspectives while interacting with developers from different vendors and seeing the differences in their implementations of the same standard, for the selected use case. He was impressed with how quickly the vendors were able to identify the issues and move to clarification. The testing process methodically isolated ambiguous areas in the script as well as code bugs. Jeff was pleasantly surprised when at the conclusion of the test, the vendors were able to disconnect from the test harness and then connect with each other’s systems and successfully exchange messages, using the compliance-tested CIM adapters.
A lack of compliance testing poses a barrier to CIM adoption because:
A
Vendors can’t get their customers to pay for the extra costs of testing.
B
The CIM model includes both normative and optional attributes, and project managers want answers, not options.
C
Flexibility is required for standards to be widely useful, but without compliance testing to drive more specificity, CIM is just not actionable.
D
Combinations of the above.
D. Combinations of the above.
CIM interoperability testing programs will produce:
A
Less vendor responsiveness, since they will expect the utilities to write their own adapters
B
More influence for utility architects and project managers as they write specifications around script-tested standards
C
More revenue for system integrators
D
All of the above
B. More influence for utility architects and project managers as they write specifications around script-tested standards
CIM Interoperability testing processes can be considered:
A
Negligibly influential
B
Likely to grow significantly in the future
C
Critical for a transforming energy industry
D
All of the above
C. Critical for a transforming energy industry