Towards the control room of the future

The National Grid Company PLC (NGC) is responsible for the development, operation and maintenance of the electricity transmission system in England and Wales. As such it has a statutory duty to deliver safe and reliable electricity supplies to the Regional Electricity Companies (REC) and some other large consumers. The network currently has nearly 14,000 circuit kilometres of overhead lines, 21,812 towers and 323 substations. With such a large network advanced systems are required to present and manage the information in real-time. The control room of the future (CRF) project is centred on researching technologies that could aid the system operators and that can be brought online in the 10-15 year time-scale. The CRF project is constructing a virtual control room that will allow the seamless integration and testing of advanced display devices whilst at the same time keeping them in context with the existing, real, environment. This paper describes some of the issues involved in designing such a virtual control room and presents an approach that allows for multimodal interfaces to be tested within this environment. Since the research at this stage is in its early phase a mixture of demonstrated results and plausible ideas for future systems are presented.