This part of IEC 62325 specifies the common information model (CIM) for energy market communications.

The CIM is an abstract model that represents all the major objects in an electric utility enterprise typically involved in utility operations and electricity market management. By providing a standard way of representing power system resources as object classes and attributes, along with their relationships, the CIM facilitates the integration of market management system (MMS) applications developed independently by different vendors, between entire MMS systems developed independently, or between an MMS system and other systems concerned with different aspects of market management, such as capacity allocation, day-ahead management, balancing, settlement, etc.

The CIM facilitates integration by defining a common language (i.e. semantics) based on the CIM to enable these applications or systems to access public data and exchange information independent of how such information is represented internally.

The object classes represented in the CIM are abstract in nature and may be used in a wide variety of applications. The use of the CIM goes far beyond its application in a market management system.

Due to the size of the complete CIM, the object classes contained in the CIM are grouped into a number of logical packages, each of which represents a certain part of the overall power system being modeled. Collections of these packages are progressed as separate international standards. This particular document specifies a set of packages which provide a logical view of the functional aspects of market management within an electricity market, and other functional aspects including environmental aspects that are closely related to electricity markets and that are shared between all applications. Other standards specify more specific parts of the model that are needed by only certain applications. Subclause 4.2 provides the current grouping of packages into standards documents.

This new edition of IEC 62325‑301 contains support for demand-side communication within a wholesale market. The IEC 62325‑301 additions include support for demand-side resource registration and enrollment of a market participating resource as well as support for deployment and performance evaluation of demand side resources. A new package has been included in this edition of IEC 62325‑301 to support environmental (weather) data. This new package ‘Environmental’ provides support for weather conditions including forecasts, observations, measurements, phenomena, and alerts. Additional updates have been added within the ‘MarketManagement’ package to support the transparency regulations, flow based market coupling and new network codes to support the European Markets. These updates include new classes, attributes and associations within the IEC 62325 packages as well as updates to existing classes, attributes and associations to accurately represent the existing use cases.