LTBVIS Lite

MATLAB 2D geographical visualization tool. It visualizes the data with geographical coordination on a 2D map and compiles the results into a movie.

LTBVIS Lite is part of the CURENT Large-Scale Testbed(LTB).

Why LTBVIS Lite

LTBVIS Lite is a standalone and lightweight visualization tool.

Installation

LTBVIS Lite runs on MATLAB R2021a.

I/O Format

coords

coords are the sites coordination in csv format. Example file looks like:

name	xcoord	ycoord
Site 1	100.1	99.9
Site 2	99.8	97.6
...	...	...
Site N	96.5	93.4

• name should be consistent with visdata.

visdata

visdata is time-series data in csv format. It contains the time stamp and data series on each location. Example file looks like:

time	Site 1	Site 2	...	Site N
0.00	1.00	1.00	...	1.00
0.05	0.99	0.98	...	0.97
...	...	...	...	...
1.00	0.92	0.91	...	0.89

• Location names should be consistent with the coords.
• The time stamp column should be named as time.

default map

You can get the map source file from: https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/73751/world.topo.bathy.200407.3x21600x10800.jpg

video

The output will be a video file in avi format.

data transformation and color setting

The input data is linearly transformed between data_max and data_min. data_max will be colored as extreme blue, and data_min will be colored as extreme red. The mean value of data_max and data_min will be transparent.

Tutorial

In the LTBVIS Lite directory, run the command below:

createvideo('wecc_gps.csv', 'wecc_out.csv', 'worldmap.jpg', 'wecc.avi')

After the program finished, your video is prepared in the same directory.

Function

The main function is createvide, which takes four parameters.

createvideo(coords, visdata, map, video)

name	type	info
coords	string	sites coordination csv file.
visdata	string	visualized data csv file.
map	string	base map file.
video	string	output video file.

Config

Some parameters are stored in config.mat. You can modify it manually.

Save the config into config.mat if you make any change of the default configuration, or the new seetings will not take effect.

name	default value	info
framerate	30	fps (frames per second).
padding	100	measured in pixels.
scale	0.0002	data transformation range.
bus_radius	3	bus point size, in pixels.
plz	1	parallelization enable, set 0 to turn off.
data_max	1.0002	maximum line of visualized data.
data_min	0.9998	minimum line of visualized data.
area_en	0	enable for user selected focus area, set 1 to turn on.
borders	[47.4550, -66.8628, 24.3959, -124.8679]	user selected area coords.
padding	[2, 2, 2, 2]	auto selected area zone.

• Parallelization can greatly accelerate the video compiling. If your device does not support parallelization, turn off plz.
• Make sure borders are correctly assigned if area_en is enabled.
• When auto selected area is enabled, you can increase the focus area by modify padding.
• When user selected area is enabled, input top longitude, left latitude, bottom longitude, right latitude into config.borders.

Citing LTB

[1] F. Li, K. Tomsovic, and H. Cui, “A Large-Scale Testbed as a Virtual Power Grid: For Closed-Loop Controls in Research and Testing,” IEEE Power and Energy Mag., vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 60–68, Mar. 2020, doi: 10.1109/MPE.2019.2959054.
[2] H. Cui, F. Li, and K. Tomsovic, “Cyber‐physical system testbed for power system monitoring and wide‐area control verification,” IET Energy Systems Integration, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 32–39, Mar. 2020, doi: 10.1049/iet-esi.2019.0084.

Contributors

Nicholas West, Jinning Wang, Hantao Cui, Can Huang, Fangxing Li.