Commercial off-the-shelf-based development of a power system data visualisation service platform

The size and complexity of recent electric power systems are increasing with many transactions that have taken place in a market environment. It makes system analysis and operation both harder and time-consuming. Visualisation has a strong capability to manage and display large volumes of data. It makes system analysis more intuitive and helps an operator in monitoring system status, understanding its phenomena, identifying its problems, and performing corrective actions to maintain the security of the system. Experiences from the 2003 Blackout of Northeast America make visualisation techniques more crucial. The authors present the work on the development of a power system data visualisation service platform (VSP) in a distributed environment. The VSP is developed based on a COTS-based software development concept. This concept and the open-source programming tools greatly reduce developing time and effort and make the platform reliable, cost-effective and easy to enhance.