Visualizing power system data. Final report

Technical Report · Fri Apr 01 04:00:00 EST 1994

OSTI ID:10147596

Christie, R D; Mahadev, P M ^[1]

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1. Washington Univ., Seattle, WA (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering

Practical use of computational tools requires that people be able to understand the results the tools produce. This is a particular problem for real world power systems because of their massive amount of data, and because existing representational methods do not provide quick and efficient communication of the qualitative information contained in that data. Instead they require users to create internal, mental representations of the data and then analyze them to extract desired information. Physical realization of these internal representations -- a visualization of the data -- should provide a breakthrough in ease of comprehension. Scientific visualization is the general name for this field. Power systems pose some unique problems that require extensions of existing visualization techniques. The resulting pictures should prove useful for power system operators and engineers, and also for lay persons with an interest in power systems, such as accountants, regulators, legislators and the general public. Energy Management System (EMS) full graphics user interfaces, and the high resolution graphics capabilities commonly available on PCs and workstations, now provide the hardware to make visualization possible on a routine basis, but adequate representations for data have not yet been developed. This project identifies general characteristics of good representations, and develops graphical representations for power system operating state and power system static security to illustrate the application of these characteristics to power system problems. Representations are developed in X Windows using X Toolkit primitives and run on a wide variety of Unix workstations. However, implementation issues have not been considered in this work. The emphasis is on developing new and effective presentation methods. The effectiveness of presentation methods is difficult to measure. A method for objectively measuring this effectiveness is described.

• Research Organization: Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States); Washington Univ., Seattle, WA (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering
• Sponsoring Organization: Electric Power Research Inst., Palo Alto, CA (United States)
• OSTI ID: 10147596
• Report Number(s): EPRI-TR--102984; ON: UN94011187
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION
240100
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
990200
ALARM SYSTEMS
COMPUTER GRAPHICS
COMPUTERIZED CONTROL SYSTEMS
INFORMATION SYSTEMS
LOAD MANAGEMENT
MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTERS
OPERATION
POWER SYSTEMS
SECURITY