Learnings

Outcomes

Since the previous progress report in 2025, four further project reports have been delivered, resulting in six reports to date in total. These are available on request for GB licensed energy networks. These six reports contain 36 visualisation guidelines which can be used as the basis for future visualisation designs in the control room.  
A virtual control room has been developed and used as a basis for evaluating visualisation designs in the control room. While this experiment was necessarily a simplified version of real control room tasks, the results validate its use as a means of visualisation evaluation. Conducting this pilot with control room engineers raises the TRL level from 2 (Invention and Research) to 5 (Pilot Scale).   

Interim Project Outcomes (since last progress report):  
>Review of visualisation literature relating to visual salience, colour, annotations, uncertainty, and visualisation-supported decision making, and the application of this literature to the control room 
>36 visualisation design guidelines for control room visualisation 
>Example of how to apply salience guidelines to design glyphs for visual alerts 
>Demonstrations of the use of quantitative models of visual processing to evaluate visualisation quality, for example relating to visual salience or colour vision deficiency 
>Results of a pilot experimental study on visual alert detection with different visual encoding designs 
>Results of an online browser-based experiment in visual encoding design for power system schematic diagrams 
>Results of an experiment in which visual alerts are evaluated within a virtual control room environment 
>Results from an online experiment investigating the role of label encoding. 

Review of Benefits Case: 
The 36 visualisation guidelines provided to date can be translated into requirements for future control room software applications and interfaces. While the focus of the project has been on large videowall display in the control room, many of the guidelines proposed can be applied more generally to control room visualisation since they build upon well-established results from the broader visualisation literature. 
Our evaluation studies have measured improvements to operator response times through the design of more visually salient network schematic diagrams. We have also identified systematic variation in expert performance in comparison to the performance of the general public.  
Validation of the virtual control room for visualisation evaluation raises the possibility of using virtual environments for operator training and simulation exercises. 

Next Steps: 
There are two final deliverables on the project. WP7 will examine screen size effects and will review relevant literature to provide visualisation guidelines concerning the role of screen size. Our final report, WP8, will act as a final summary to the project. It will include all the design guidelines proposed during the project, summarise our empirical findings, and discuss the implications of these findings. It will also present recommendations for further work to realise some of the expected benefits through improved visualisation design, such as improved decision making and response times in the control room.

Dissemination: 
King’s College London have published an academic article on the development of visualisation guidelines for the control rooms. This article will be presented to the visualisation research community at the Eurographics Conference on Visualisation (EuroVis) 2026 in Nottingham, 8th-12th June 2026 and will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Computer Graphics Forum. 
There are plans to publish an additional article on the virtual reality experiments conducted at NESO.  
King’s College London have also presented the project and supported a demonstration of the virtual control room to NESO non-executive directors.   

Lessons Learnt

An important lesson learned has been the value of engaging end users throughout the research process. Involving control room operators, trainers, and staff in adjacent roles as participants in experiments not only provides valuable empirical evidence from representative users but also prompts meaningful discussions around how visualisations support operational decision-making, situational awareness, and control room tasks. These discussions can reveal practical requirements and preferences that may not emerge through technical development alone. 
 This further highlights the importance of adopting a user-centred approach to visualisation design. Early and continuous engagement with end users can help ensure that visualisations are aligned with operator needs. This reduces the risk of developing solutions that are effective under experimental conditions but perhaps difficult to integrate into control room tasks. Future visualisation development should look to end users to contribute directly to the design, evaluation and refinement of visualisations, with the goal of improving user acceptance and successful deployment.