Knowledge Base

Creating and Modifying System Diagrams

Simulator provides a number of tools to aid you in creating and modifying system diagrams rapidly and efficiently:

  • You can specify default drawing values for display objects based on object type and nominal kV.  These values can also be saved to or loaded from auxiliary files providing continuity when creating multiple diagrams.
  • Insert palettes for areas, buses, substations, and zones allow you to drag and drop display objects onto diagrams at the desired location
  • GIS Coordinate fields for bus and substation objects allow you to automatically insert these objects into diagrams using geographic latitude-longitude coordinate pairs.  Alternatively, you can automatically insert these objects using x-y coordinate pairs corresponding to the x-y diagram coordinates.
  • The PowerWorld border library, which includes borders for every nation, as well as US State and County borders and Canadian Provinces, allows you to automatically insert geographic borders into diagrams
  • Lines, interfaces, generators, switched shunts, line flow pie charts, circuit breakers, and  line flow objects can be automatically inserted into drawings once the node buses, substations, areas or zones (as applicable) have been inserted.
  • The Select by Criteria tool allows you to select groups of display objects meeting the criteria you specify, and then format the display properties of all objects in the group simultaneously.

Introduction

PowerWorld Display Files

Diagrams are stored as a *.pwd  (PowerWorld Display) file.  The core of every diagram is the system buses.    One common misconception is that power system model information is stored with the *.pwd file.  In reality, model data is stored in *.pwb (PowerWorld Binary) files, not with the diagrams.  Bus numbers provide the link between drawing files and the model data.  This allows the same diagram or diagrams to be used with multiple power system case files.

Display/Model Relationships

The relationship between display objects and the system model is not a one-to-one mapping.  Multiple display objects can be linked to the same model object.  This allows you to use multiple display files (*.pwd) for the same system model (*.pwb file) and to assign different display objects representing the same model object to different layers or zoom levels on your diagrams.  This approach is extremely powerful but introduces ambiguity when deleting display objects.  For that reason, anytime that you attempt to delete a display object from a diagram, the PowerWorld application asks you if you want to delete just the display object or both the display and model object.

Next Tip: Default Drawing Values

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October 4, 2011