Visualization Techniques for Electrical Grid Smart Metering Data: A Survey

One of the considerable initiatives towards creating a smart society could be the guarantee of a smart, resilient and reliable power grid. As an attempt to improve the electricity supply service, it would be meaningful for the distributed system operators (DSOs) to be able to monitor the current status of the grid. The prediction of future possible critical situations would then be feasible using the available information, whereas, based on historical data, further grid expansion and reinforcement may be planned. A proper presentation and visualization of the near-real time metering data may constitute the baseline for bringing improvements to the power grid. This paper presents an approach to build an efficient visualization system so that the extracted smart meters information can be used in a meaningful manner. An overview of the use cases related to the visualization features is first presented, as a motivation for the choice of the relevant state of the art research. In relation to the knowledge provided by the metering data, a definition of the big data concept will be further introduced, according to the requirements established by the project definition. Geographic Information System (GIS) tools are useful to help visualize the collected big data in near-real time. For this reason, a survey of existing GIS software will be made so that the choice of the most suitable tool can be justified. Also, the integration of GIS technologies into the Common Information Model (CIM) aims to improve the visualization efficiency. As a consequence, investigating methods for adapting CIM standards to the GIS platform are also important.