This IEC document is one of the IEC 61970‑450 to 499 series that, taken as a whole, defines at an abstract level the content and exchange mechanisms used for data transmitted between control centers and/or control center components, such as power systems applications.

The purpose of this document is to define the subset of classes, class attributes, and roles from the CIM necessary to execute state estimation and power flow applications. The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) Data Exchange Working Group (DEWG) Common Power System Modeling group (CPSM) produced the original data requirements, which are shown in Annex E. These requirements are based on prior industry practices for exchanging power system model data for use primarily in planning studies. However, the list of required data has been extended to facilitate a model exchange that includes parameters common to breaker-oriented applications. Where necessary this document establishes conventions, shown in Clause 6, with which an XML data file must comply in order to be considered valid for exchange of models.

This document is intended for two distinct audiences, data producers and data recipients, and may be read from two perspectives.

From the standpoint of model export software used by a data producer, the document describes a minimum subset of CIM classes, attributes, and associations which must be present in an XML formatted data file for model exchange. This standard does not dictate how the network is modelled, however. It only dictates what classes, attributes, and associations are to be used to describe the source model as it exists.

Optional and required classes, attributes and associations must be imported if they are in the model file prior to import. If an optional attribute does not exist in the imported file, it does not have to be exported in case exactly the same data set is exported, i.e. the tool is not obliged to automatically provide this attribute. If any mandatory attribute or association is missing, the exchanged data is considered invalid. Specific business processes may relax restrictions of the profile, but such exchanges would not be considered to be compliant with the standard. Business processes governing different exchanges can also require mandatory exchange of certain optional attributes or associations.

Furthermore, an exporter may, at his or her discretion, produce an XML data file containing additional class data described by the CIM RDF Schema but not required by this document provided these data adhere to the conventions established in Clause 6.

From the standpoint of the model import used by a data recipient, the document describes a subset of the CIM that importing software must be able to interpret in order to import exported models. As mentioned above, data providers are free to exceed the minimum requirements described herein as long as their resulting data files are compliant with the CIM RDF Schema and the conventions established in Clause 6. The document, therefore, describes additional classes and class data that, although not required, exporters will, in all likelihood, choose to include in their data files. The additional classes and data are labeled as required (cardinality 1..1) or as optional (cardinality 0..1) to distinguish them from their required counterparts. Please note, however, that data importers could potentially receive data containing instances of any and all classes described by the CIM RDF Schema.