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WaveLines: towards effective visualization and analysis of stability in power grid simulation

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Abstract

Closely related to the safety and stability of power grids, stability analysis has long been a core topic in the electric industry. Conventional approaches employ computational simulation to make the quantitative judgement of the grid stability under distinctive conditions. The lack of in-depth data analysis tools has led to the difficulty in analytical tasks such as situation-aware analysis, instability reasoning and pattern recognition. To facilitate visual exploration and reasoning on the simulation data, we introduce WaveLines, a visual analysis approach which supports the supervisory control of multivariate simulation time series of power grids. We design and implement an interactive system that supports a set of analytical tasks proposed by domain experts and experienced operators. Experiments have been conducted with domain experts to illustrate the usability and effectiveness of WaveLines.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank all collaborators from China Electric Power Research Institute (CEPRI). This work was supported by National Key Research and Development Program (2018YFB0904503), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61772456, 61761136020).

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Correspondence to Wenting Zheng.

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Tianye Zhang received her BS in mathematics from the Zhejiang University, China in 2016. She is currently a PhD student in the College of Computer Science and Technology at the Zhejiang University, China. Her research interests include information visualization and visual analytics.

Qi Wang received his master degree in computer science from the Zhejiang University, China in 2018. His research interests includes development of high performance and complex visual analytic system.

Liwen Lin received his master degree in computer science from the Zhejiang University, China in 2019. His research interests include information visualization and visualanalytics.

Jiazhi Xia received the BS, MS degrees in computer science from Zhejiang University, China and the PhD degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, China. His research interest includes visualization and visual analytics.

Xiwang Xu received the MS degree in electrical engineering from North China Electric Power University, China in 2011. Currently, he is with the China Electric Power Research Institute, China. His research interests is on power system simulation software development, power system stability analysis, and simulation data visual analytics.

Yanhao Huang is a doctor and engineer at the State Key Lab of Power Grid Safety and Energy Conservation, China Electric Power Research Institute, China. His research interests is on power system simulation and electric big data, and has published more than 10 papers.

Xiaonan Luo is a professor at the Guilin University of Electronic Technology, China. His research interests is on digital home technology, mobile computing, image processing and CAD technology.

Wenting Zheng is a professor at the State Key Lab of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University, China. His research interests is on Computer Graphics, Visualization and Virtual Reality.

Wei Chen is a professor at the State Key Lab of CAD & CG, Zhejiang University, China. His research interests is on visualization and visual analysis, and has published more than 30 IEEE/ACM Transactions and IEEE VIS papers. He actively served as guest or associate editors of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Journal of Visualization.

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Zhang, T., Wang, Q., Lin, L. et al. WaveLines: towards effective visualization and analysis of stability in power grid simulation. Front. Comput. Sci. 15, 156704 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-019-9393-5

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