Application of CIM extension principles and guidelines in modeling CAISO market system

California Independent System Operator Corporation (CAISO) is a not-for-profit public benefit corporation in charge of managing the electricity flow along Californiapsilas open-market wholesale power grid. Recently, the CAISO approved two major programs to assure grid reliability and efficiency and to upgrade the entire CAISO information technology system. These two programs were managed in one CAISO initiative, the Market Redesign and Technology Upgrade (MRTU) program. The program requires many systems and applications to work together to deliver what was designed and promised. One of the greatest challenges was to manage the business semantics within CAISO in order to make those systems and applications to exchange data with a flexible, reusable, and extensible fashion. This paper summarizes how CAISO leverages IEC TC57 Common Information Model (CIM) as the base model to address the business semantic issues. The CIM extension philosophy and guidelines are also outlined here to explain how CIM is extended and customized to meet project and enterprise requirements.