Automatic Generation of Topology Diagrams for Strongly-Meshed Power Transmission Systems

Topology diagrams are widely seen in power system applications, but their automatic generation is often easier said than done. When facing power transmission systems with strongly-meshed structures, existing approaches can hardly produce topology diagrams catering to the aesthetics of readers. This paper proposes an integrated framework for generating aesthetically-pleasing topology diagrams for power transmission systems. Input with a rough layout, the framework first conducts visibility region analysis to reduce line crossings and then solves a mixed-integer linear programming problem to optimize the arrangement of nodes. Given that the complexity of both modules is pretty high, simplification heuristics are also proposed to enhance the efficiency of the framework. Case studies on several power transmission systems containing up to 2,046 nodes demonstrate the capability of the proposed framework in generating topology diagrams conforming to aesthetic criteria in the power system community. Compared with the widespread force-directed algorithm, the proposed framework can preserve the relative positions of nodes in the original layout to a great extent, which significantly contributes to the identification of electrical elements on the diagrams. Meanwhile, the time consumption is acceptable for practical applications.