Energy Control Rooms of the Future

Primary supervisor

Sarah Goodwin

Co-supervisors

NOTE THIS IS A SUMMER INTERNSHIP PROJECT FOR SUMMER 2024 (Nov 2024-Feb 2025). THIS IS NOT A HONOURS OR MINOR THESIS PROJECT. 

There may be an opportunity to work on this project as an honours/minor thesis project in S1 2025. 

This project is an exciting opportunity to work on a multidisciplinary initiative aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of energy control room operations. By focusing on human factors, best practices in visualisation, decision support, explainable AI, and optimisation, this project explores how to present information effectively for control room operators, ultimately contributing to the stability and efficiency of energy grid operations.

In this internship you will have the opportunity to explore advanced visualisation techniques and decision support tools to improve the situational awareness and decision-making capabilities of control room operators. As an intern on this project you will get the opportunity to work on methodologies such as data visualisation design and development, data analysis (including eye-tracking analysis, audio, video and observational data), explainable AI, decision support and optimisation.

Your tasks will depend on your skills and interests for your own career development. The results of your internship will help in presenting critical information in a more intuitive and actionable manner, allowing operators to quickly interpret and respond to real-time data.

Student cohort

Single Semester

Aim/outline

Potential areas of focus for the summer internship include:

  • Helping to analyse eye tracking data to understand operator behaviour;
  • Improving our opensource eye-tracking software to integrate better video analysis for improving our eye tracking analysis;
  • Designing and/or developing operator interfaces and visual representations that enhance operator experience and decision-making efficiency;
  • Developing explainable AI interfaces for improving communication of AI for operators;
  • Analysing operator workforce and procedures to improve decision support opportunities;
  • Exploring how to present (multiple) data-driven solutions to complex problems.
  • And many more.. 

Our research project is about to commence in late August 2024. Data from our control room obsevations will be collected in October prior to the internships commencing. You will be working with us to analyse this data over summer. 

The project is funded by Global Power Systems Transformation: Topic 3: Control Room of the Future (https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/energy/g-pst-research-roadmap).

Join our team to help shape the future of energy grid management and ensuring control room operators have the best tools and support to maintain stability and efficiency.

URLs/references

For some background. See our previous energy control room research on operator cognitive load here:

  • Afzal Umair , Arnaud Prouzeau, Lee Lawrence, Tim Dwyer, Saikiranrao Bichinepally, Ariel Liebman, and Sarah Goodwin (2022) Investigating Cognitive Load in Energy Network Control Rooms: Recommendations for Future Designs, Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 2022. DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2022.812677

The case study in this paper introduces our eye tracking visual analysis for understanding control room operator behaviour:

  • Sarah Goodwin, Arnaud Prouzeau, Ryan Whitelock-Jones, Christophe Hurter, Lee Lawrence, Umair Afzal, Tim Dwyer (2022), VETA: Visual eye-tracking analytics for the exploration of gaze patterns and behaviours, Visual Informatics, 6(2), 2022, Pages 1-13, ISSN 2468-502X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visinf.2022.02.004.

The newer web version and opensourced visual eye tracking anaysis software is available here (and used by a June of eye tracking analysts):

https://github.com/gazealytics/gazealytics-master

Documented here:

  • Kun-Ting Chen, Arnaud Prouzeau, Joshua Langmead, Ryan T Whitelock-Jones, Lee Lawrence, Tim Dwyer, Christophe Hurter, Daniel Weiskopf, and Sarah Goodwin. 2023. Gazealytics: A Unified and Flexible Visual Toolkit for Exploratory and Comparative Gaze Analysis. In Proceedings of the 2023 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 69, 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1145/3588015.3589844

Required knowledge

  • Proficient programming skills
  • Clear verbal and written communication skills
  • Demonstrated ability to work both in a team and independently
  • Interest in sustainability, environment, and/or energy systems;
  • interest in improving systems for critical data-driven decision making
  • Project management skills;

We are particularly interested in mid-final year or masters students, however, welcome applicants with the above skills and interest in the project.