Voltage contours for power system visualization

Power system engineers are presented with vast amounts of information to an alyze during daily operations. In systems containing thousands of buses, it can be very difficult to assess the state of the power system in an intuit ive and rapid manner. The paper discusses the use of contours for visualizi ng power system voltage data. Also, because of the low computation requirem ents of the contouring algorithm, the algorithm is implemented into a real- time animation of the voltage profile of a power system, The contouring rou tines are implemented into the PowerWorld(TM) Simulator software package, w ith results shown for systems with up to several thousand buses. Experiment s and interviews with system engineers are also discussed to measure the ap plicability of voltage contouring as an add-on to practical EMS systems.