Services

Methodology

Consulting service is one of our core businesses. We help utilities and vendors build custom solutions. The consulting team at Power Info LLC is made up of subject-matter experts in various technical areas. The team has a tremendous depth of experience and is committed to keeping at the leading edge in areas of competence. We are highly motivated to deliver extensible and sustainable solutions to our clients to meet their evolving business needs.

Realizing that it is impractical to build one-fit-all software solutions to meet the diverse project requirements, we adopt a model-driven software development methodology when building our standard-based framework. The model-driven software is difficult to build initially, but enables us to deliver the custom solutions rapidly and cost-effectively. Most importantly, customers can easily customize and maintain our model-driven solutions to meet their new business requirements.

Services Available

  • Customization
  • Integration
  • Consulting
  • Subcontracting
  • Training
  • Maintenance
  • Technical Support
  • Project Delivery

Core Service Areas

CIM-based 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. Common Information model (CIM) provided a standard-based semantic framework for model exchange. As a pioneer in this emerging application area, we build extensible and scalable CIM import/export solutions to make the utility information systems interoperable. We contributed to some large utility integration and model exchange projects in the US and Europe, including ERCOT Nodal project and ENTSO-E CIM InterOp (IOP) tests. The tools we developed help our clients analyze CIM-based models effectively. Today, passing CIMdesk model validation has become mandatory for European transmission utilities to submit their CIM-based models to ENTSO-E, their governing organization.

Integrated Grid Visualization

Traditionally, power grid visualization applications were designed as functions of a monolithic system. These legacy visualization applications, built with the proprietary technologies, are not interoperable with the existing utility information infrastructure and are difficult to extend. Driven by the emerging business requirements in the industry, Power Info pioneered a standard-based approach to interactive visualization of large power grids. Based on CIM, the new visualization solution consolidates the information from various sources and enables users to visualize the power system and its operations at various levels and from different perspectives. Furthermore it provides users rich user experience and visual data mining capabilities in support of exploratory data analysis. Designed as an add-on tool, the standard-based visualization solution is targeted to fill many of the gaps in today’s EMS/MMS/OMS/DMS.

External Network Modeling

For effective security analysis, a significant portion of the external network must be properly represented and timely updated in the EMS network model. Traditionally, external network modeling was a labor-intensive and error-prone manual process. With the availability of region-wide operational models, such as WECC’s West-wide System Model (WSM), utilities are now seeking better solutions to enhance their external network modeling. Power Info developed a methodology and a tool kit that can significantly reduce the engineering effort needed to build and maintain external EMS network models. We accumulated tremendous depth of experience in this emerging application arena while helping our customers achieve their project goals. Such expertise is further transferred to the customers so that they can self-maintain the delivered model merging solutions for future model update.

Tool Customization

We build CIM-based tools, such as CIMSpy and grid-IE, to address the common industry requirements. However, CIM is incomplete and still evolving. Almost every CIM-related project requires standard CIM to be extended to meet special project requirements. The adopted model-driven software development methodology enables us to effectively deal with these challenges in this changing world and cost-effectively customize our tools to fit specific project needs. Furthermore, we provide strong support for customers to customize the delivered tools. For example, CIMdesk, a customized version of CIMSpy, was delivered to ENTSO-E and its 41 Transmission System Operators (TSOs) in Europe to support open model exchange. Some of the TSOs customized CIMdesk either by themselves or through us to support other business practices and projects within their organizations.

Centralized Single-Entry Modeling

One of the ultimate design goals of our tools is supporting CIM-based single-entry modeling and centralized information management. Under this methodology, a modeling entry should be entered once, and then will be available for all of the downstream applications and information systems. This is particularly useful for building or maintaining a region-wide power system model. By leveraging a single-entry modeling system, grid coordinating organization simply defines the model boundary sets and then let each member utility or model authority build and maintain the model within their service territories. The single-entry modeling tool will provide sophisticated but customizable work flow process to automate the model management. Users could draft the model changes, build a study case, run the validation, and finally submit the model changes.

Utility Information Management

Information management is 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).