Macomber Map

Demonstration

Michael E. Legatt, Ph.D.

Senior Human Factors Engineer

EMS Users Conference

September 20, 2010

2 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Copyright / Trademark

The materials included within the presentation are the intellectual property of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

All content contained herein, literary, pictorial, graphic or

otherwise are copyright protected © 2010, ERCOT, Inc.,

Michael E. Legatt, Ph.D.

“Macomber Map” is a pending trademark of ERCOT, Inc.

All rights reserved.

3 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

History

• Need for situation awareness and user experience enhancements in control rooms

• Blackout of 2003

• Main issues:

– Need for wide-area and high-level views

– “Alarm storm”

– “Dust storm”

– Locations of equipment

– Navigation between one-lines

– Naming conventions for equipment

– Data integration across multiple systems

– Increased cognitive load as operators increasingly managing more tasks with more complex systems.

• This trend is only continuing (e.g., advanced metering)

4 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

History

• Gary Macomber & Kate Horne performed initial research on the needs in control room in 2005.

• I started at ERCOT in 2007, working with on UI improvements in the control room, meeting at least once a week with control room operators and other key staff.

• Over the ensuing years, ongoing prototyping, display building and integrated visualization systems were developed with refinements based on continual user feedback.

• In 2008, Gary passed away a week before approval to develop one of these prototypes into a new control room UI, and it’s named in his memory – Macomber Map.

5 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Macomber Map

• Macomber Map is a visualization tool – business processes run by the core systems

• Macomber Map being used in control room, by NERC, FERC, and TRE for monitoring, engineers for studying, training.

• Core functionality:

– Integrates the many data sources in the control room: network model, real-time and study energy data, market data, so that an operator can see all data for single element (e.g., a generator), across applications and systems.

– A “Google” approach to the transmission grid, allowing operators to locate elements by a series of keywords (e.g., name, county, voltage, owner)

– Linking all transmission elements to a point on the map, to prevent alarm and dust storms

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Macomber Map

• Core functionality (continued)

– Operating in a pyramid approach, allowing operators to drill down quickly from high-level to detailed data rapidly: “forest and the trees.”

– Consistent positional awareness, regardless of detail level Linking equipment with ownership and operatorship information for rapid response.

– When possible, linking problems with potential solutions.

– Allowing operators to aggregate data within regions (e.g., Hurricane Dolly).

7 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Macomber Map

• Many departments using tools derived from Macomber Map (over 20)

– Control room

– Network modeling group

– Congestion Revenue Rights (CRR) group

– MIS Group (Contour map of locational marginal pricing and settlement point pricing)

– Training group

– Engineering

• User Experience improvements

• Several projects using MM core libraries for quicker development, easier business process integration, significant cost savings to ERCOT.

8 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Ongoing enhancements

• Integration with additional systems and data (e.g., TruWind)

• Using MM as a test platform for research, determining optimum color patterns, etc.

• Increased utility in viewing historical data

• Additional weather data

9 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Macomber Map

10 Texas Senate – Energy ThursdayJune 3, 2010

Macomber Map