As part of my research work I've been looking at novel interfaces to allow engineers to visualise electrical network activity and identify clusters of faults both geographically and temporally. This involved integrating data from a number of sources (and so brought in the main focus of my research, information modelling and the benefits of standards to the electrical industry) including Geographical data (thus allowing me to play with the Google Maps API) and fault data.
This required a means of showing where and when the fault took place and a mechanism for sending the fault data in a standard format (in this case XML messages derived from the Common Information Model - CIM - the collective name for IEC 61970-301 and IEC 61968-11) . To this end, I integrated a slightly modified version of Timeline that uses a (buggy) variation on Liming Xu's modifications (described here: http://limingxu.com/blogs/xu_web_chronicle/archive/ 2006/07/10/59.aspx ) with a Google Maps view that will show a fault on the map and on the Timeline, and move them both about automatically to track the activity. The demo uses a real distribution network from the French Alps which they kindly agreed to make public (but with anonymised Substation names... so that's why they read like they're from a random French name generator...). The activity data is just randomly generated by a Java servlet server-side and the Javascript parses this XML and then populates the Map, Timeline and Activity List. The demo can be found here: http://cimphony.org/demos/timeline/ Just click start and it should load one or more events from the server then it will wait 10 seconds and do the same and continue ad infinitum (... it worked under IE last time I tried it but my main development machine is a Mac so I have a terrible habit of developing for Firefox or Safari and finding out that IE just doesn't like it...). There are some more details on my blog here: http://cimphony.org/blog/2007/12/17/geographical-and-temporal-fault- tracking-using-cim-xml-messaging/ (And there will be even more information in a conference paper next year, but it will be more focussed on the power-engineering side of things rather than the far more interesting Javascript stuff! :-) Thanks to David and the rest of the Simile team for creating something so useful! (I'm probably mad for posting this just before Christmas, so if the blog and demo disappear it will be because someone forgot to leave the server on over the festive period) Alan -- Dr Alan McMorran Research Fellow Advanced Electrical Systems Group Institute for Energy and Environment Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department University of Strathclyde _______________________________________________ General mailing list [email protected] http://simile.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/general
