A Data-Driven Approach to Interactive Visualization of Power Systems

Information visualization appears to be a promising technique for improving the business practices in today's electric power industry. The legacy power system visualization tools, however, restrict the visualization process to follow a limited number of pre-defined patterns created by human designers, thus hindering users' ability to discover. This paper proposes a data-driven approach to interactive visualization of power systems. The proposed approach relies on developing powerful data manipulation algorithms to create visualizations based on the characteristics of empirically or mathematically derived data. Based on this approach, a data-driven model exploratory tool has been developed to enable users to visualize the power system's physical/electrical configurations at various levels and from different perspectives. The conducted case studies have demonstrated that the data-driven approach could result in an interactive and user-driven power system visualization tool that fosters scientific understanding and insight, therefore unleashing the power of visualization.