From documents to knowledge graphs: Intelligent requirements management using CIM-based ontology

Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), evolving grid architectures, and interoperability requirements, demands a more intelligent and automated approach to requirements management. Traditional methods are often reliant on fragmented documentation and manual validation and are no longer sufficient to ensure consistency, traceability and compliance across the asset lifecycle. This paper presents a novel framework for intelligent requirements management using a CIM-based (Common Information Model) ontology, enabling automated reasoning and validation. By leveraging semantic web technologies such as Resource

Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), SPARQL Protocol and RDF

Query Language (SPARQL), the proposed approach transforms static requirement documents into a dynamic, query-able knowledge graph. This ontology-based approach captures the semantics of engineering requirements, aligns them with standardized CIM classes, and supports automated compliance checking, inheritance of constraints, and consistency validation. A Proof of Concept (PoC) was implemented at a Distribution System Operator

(DSO) in the northwest Europe region demonstrated significant benefits, including improved data quality, reduced manual effort in requirement filtering and validation, and enhanced traceability. The ontology-based approach enabled engineers to retrieve all applicable requirements for specific asset configurations, detect inconsistencies and redundancies, and validate compliance against design data using automated queries.