A virtual environment for interactive visualization of power system economic and security information

Abstract

Simulation and analysis of power systems often involves modeling extremely complex systems. This is particularly true when the model involves not just the electrical power system, but also other networks layered on top of the power system, such as the accompanying financial transactions. Such layered networks can often involve interactions that are not at all obvious. Interactive visualization can be a very effective means for determining otherwise hidden relationships between various elements in the network. This paper describes a 3D virtual environment developed to allow users to interactively visualize such information and relationships. The paper describes the architecture used to develop this environment, and then provides several examples of how the environment is used to provide an interactive visualization of power system economic and security information.

Simultaneous Visualization of Different Utility Networks for Disaster Management

“…During a crisis response, various information sources have to be collected and combined by different stakeholders (Paton and Flin, 1999;Dransch, 2007). The aim of our conceptual framework is to develop a visualization for multiple utility networks that can provide support for coordinated activity (MacEachren, 2005) and for dialogue about decisions, situations, strategies, and information.…”

“…This is due to networks becoming more dense due to expansion to satisfy increasing supply requests. Accordingly, network objects and their visual representations becomes increasingly heterogeneous, complex, fragmented and mutually interdependent from each other as well (Overbye et al, 1999). Thus, specialists in disaster response, mitigation, and recovery require reliable, actual, and formatted information.…”

Visualization of power system data

“…In order to investigate the application of virtual environments for EMS visualization a prototype VE was developed [18]. In implementing a VE for EMS type applications several key issues must to be addressed.…”

“…For pragmatic reasons, such as budget constraints and the ability to use existing software, the prototype VE originally described in [18] was based upon the widely available PC platform and used standard input devices, such as a mouse and keyboard, for the VE control. A benefit to this approach is that it allows the potential to make this VE available to a wide variety of users, without requiring new hardware.…”

New methods for the visualization of electric power system information

“…In more advanced applications, such as the optimal power flow (OPF), contingency analysis, and available transmission capacity (ATC) calculations, this list of variables is even longer. This section presents results on the use of an interactive 3D visualization environment to assist in analyzing this vast amount of information [18].…”