A Data-Driven Approach to Interactive Visualization of Power Grids

The emerging field of visual analytics, which integrates analytical reasoning with interactive visualization, appears to be a promising technique for improving the business practices in todays electric power industry. The conducted investigation has revealed that the existing commercial power grid visualization tools focus on displaying the data rather than providing users an interactive ability to facilitate information exploration. These tools, typically designed to support a particular type of applications, restrict the information exploration process to follow a limited number of pre-defined visualization patterns created by human designers, thus, hindering the users ability to discover. This project proposes a data-driven approach to interactive visualization of power grids. A data-driven visualization uses empirically or mathematically derived data to dynamically formulate the visualization. The approach relies on developing powerful data manipulation algorithms to create visualizations based on the characteristics of data. It will result in an interactive and user-driven visualization tool that fosters scientific understanding and insight, therefore, unleashing the power of visualization. The proposed data-driven visualization approach, as demonstrated in the preliminary investigation conducted during Phase I, has proven to be promising for building the next-generation power grid visualization tools. Application of this approach has resulted in a state-of-the-art query-driven model exploratory tool currently leveraged by utilities and vendors in the power industry. The proposed Phase II of this project will focus on prototyping an event-driven visualization tool designed to enhance situational awareness in a power grid control room. The goal is to assist system operators to perceptually monitor a large number of events and present the analytical information in a way that reduces cognitive demands on operators. It is expected that the research conducted and the prototype developed during this phase of the project will be carried over to Phase III and eventually result in a commercial tool that will benefit the industry and make the grid operation more secure.