Novel Quality Metrics for Power System Diagrams

Power network diagrams are typically neither enlightening nor attractive to look at. Encouragingly, though, the visualization of generic complex networks has been an active area of research for the past two decades, and there now exist a number of widely-deployed algorithms that show a network's structure in a revealing and aesthetic way. Additionally, recent work by the present authors has proposed techniques for diagramming power systems that explicitly use meaningful electrical distance metrics. Which is the most effective approach to diagramming? To begin to answer this question, this paper proposes new quality metrics for power system diagrams which seek to quantify how legibly a network layout reveals how power flows through it.