BS EN 61970-501:2006

What is BS EN 61970-501—Energy management system application program interface about? 

BS EN 61970-501 specifies a Component Interface Specification (CIS) for energy management systems application program interfaces. 

BS EN 61970-501 specifies the format and rules for producing a machine-readable form of the Common Information Model (CIM) as specified in the IEC 61970-301 standard. It describes a CIM vocabulary to support the data access facility and associated CIM semantics. 

BS EN 61970-501 supports a mechanism for applications from independent suppliers to access CIM metadata in a generic format and with standard services for the purpose of subsequent CIM data access.  

BS EN 61970-501 is the Level 2 Component Interface Specification standard that describes in narrative terms (with text and examples based on the CIM), the detailed definition of the CIM metadata interface to be standardized. 

Who is BS EN 61970-501—Energy management system application program interface for?  

BS EN 61970-501 on Energy management system application program interface is relevant to: 

• Entities dealing with energy management systems 
• Developers of Common information model 
• Regulatory authorities 
• Electric power research institutions 
• Independent suppliers to access CIM metadata 

Why should you use BS EN 61970-501—Energy management system application program interface? 

The common Information Model (CIM) is an abstract model that represents all the major objects in an electric utility enterprise typically contained in an EMS information model. RDF Schema is the schema specification language expressed using RDF to describe resources and their properties, including how resources are related to other resources, which is used to specify an application-specific schema. 

BS EN 61970-501 serves the objectives to provide CIM versioning capabilities and a mechanism that is easily extensible to support site-specific needs. The proposed solution is as follows: 

• Is both machine-readable and human-readable, although primarily intended for programmatic access 
• Can be accessed using any tool that supports the Document Object Model (DOM) application program interface 
• Is self-describing 
• Takes advantage of current web standards 

BS EN 61970-501 defines an Application Program Interface (API) for an Energy Management System (EMS). BS EN 61970-501 is based upon the work of the EPRI Control Centre API (CCAPI) research project (RP-3654-1).  

BS EN 61970-501 specifies the mapping between the conceptual model specified as Unified Modelling Language (UML) defined in the IEC 61970 series: Common Information Model and the Machine-readable Extensible Markup Language (XML) representation of that schema using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) Schema specification language.  

BS EN 61970-501 assists the user with the RDF Schema which allows the definition of application-specific vocabularies. RDF Schema is a very concise way to represent the CIM classes and their attributes and relationships.  

Overall, BS EN 61970-501 is useful as it provides guidance on the CIM UML enumeration classes that have a stereotype of ‘Enumeration’. For each predefined instance of the datatype, an instance of the class is created in the CIM RDF Schema.