Unifying Data Types of IEC 61850 and CIM

IEC 61850 and IEC 61970-301 (CIM) are core standards in the electrical power domain. IEC 61850 is concerned with control and protection in a substation, while CIM addresses power management. There has been a great attention to unifying these standards to support interoperability in smart grids. However, due to their difference natures and independent evolution, the unification of IEC 61850 and CIM has been a great challenge. A prerequisite to their unification is unifying data types. In this paper, we present an approach for unifying data types of IEC 61850 and CIM. In the approach, the semantics of all the data types in the standards are analyzed to identify matching and non-matching types. Based on the analysis, data types are unified by applying a set of unification principles. We demonstrate tool support for transforming IEC 61850 and CIM data types to unified data types using Query/View/Transformation (QVT).