Mikko’s research topics at ABB Corporate Research

Keywords:

information visualization, power transmission & distribution.

Power grid visualization

Currently, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems used to manage the power grid have been designed in the 90’s and lack modern visualization methods. Sometimes operators in the control room do not see clearly what is happening outside in the power grid through the system. We tested several information visualization methods, especially parallel coordinates and coordinated views, as the user interface for filtering out the irrelevant noise from the interesting information the operator needs to see at a specific moment when analyzing the power grid’s status. We showed that these methods can significantly improve the user’s ability to filter, see and make sense about connections and inter-dependencies within the data in an intuitive and interactive manner.

International conference papers:

Saad bin Azhar and Mikko J. Rissanen. Evaluation of parallel coordinates for interactive alarm filtering. In: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Information Visualization (IV), London, UK, July 13-15, 2011, pp. 102–109. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/IV.2011.30

Christine Mikkelsen, Jimmy Johansson and Mikko Rissanen. Interactive information visualization for sensemaking in power grid supervisory control systems. In: Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Information Visualization (IV), London, UK, July 13-15, 2011, pp. 119–126. IEEE. DOI: 10.1109/IV.2011.100

Patents:

Mikko Rissanen. Method for visualization of transmission flow in a system, an operator terminal and a supervisory control system. United States Patent US8970600B2 filed June 29, 2009, granted March 3, 2015.

Mikko Rissanen. Power grid visualization.WIPO International Patent Application WO 2010/118784 A1 filed June 29, 2009, United States Patent US8560949B2 granted October 15, 2013.

Mikko Rissanen. Improved overview of process control data on an operator terminal display of a process control system. WIPO International Patent Application WO 2010/121667 A1 filed June 25, 2009.

Sources of inspiration:

Harri Siirtola’s paper Combining parallel coordinates with the reorderable matrix and Monika Lanzenberger et al.‘s paper Exploring highly structured data were one of the few good works that empirically evaluated visualization methods we used in this project.

Gary Klein et al.’s theoretical discussions Making sense of sensemaking Part 1 and Part 2 were the foundation of the philosophy our visualization concepts aimed at.