How electrical engineers start adopting UML
For my work, I have been involved in different activities related to IEC standards for electrical utilities, and in particular to:
- IEC 61850: Communications Networks and Systems in Substations, International Standard
- IEC 61970: Energy Management System Application Programming Interface (EMS-API), International Standard
- IEC 61968: System Interfaces for Distribution Systems, draft International Standard
The latter two have adopted UML as the language for the formal, normative specification of the CIM - Common Information Model. The first one has not adopted that approach, yet... So, in the last few years, I have been working on developing such a UML model of IEC 61850.
In one of my publications (and the associated presentation), you can find an introductory material comparing the first two standards and some issues on their integration. Search the same page for IEC to find other related publications.
All the above work and its products are hosted by the UCA user group. CIM-related standards, UML models and XML/RDF/OWL schemas are available with a guest account at the CIM user group site:
- Current CIM Model as well as WG14, Part 11 directory Draft IECTC 57 Documents contain the latest CIM UML model draft
- The public shared WG13 and WG14 folders on Draft IECTC 57 Documents contain publicly available IEC draft documents.
- Open source tools used for editing CIM-related IEC documents and for validation of CIM UML model ara available in the Tools Group Documents.
- Finally, we currently use another open source tool, CIMTool, to generate XML/RDF/OWL schemas. That web site has pointers to other open source tools related to CIM.
