Control room in an experimental load-dispatching system for the power-supply industry

The paper describes the extra facilities provided in a control room for an experimental automatic load-dispatching system, installed for evaluation trials by the CEGB in south-west England. These facilities permitted limited operational experience to be obtained and demonstrated the feasibility of this application of automatic control. The important differences in the control room, compared with a conventional design, are the elimination of the wall diagrams and the ready access to all system data via a specially designed keyboard and alpha-numeric c.r.t. displays. The control engineers´ chief difficulties have been in ensuring that realistic constraints and accurate data are used in the computer´s calculations. These difficulties will place greater emphasis on displays, the display-selection system and the methods of data collection and alarm analysis in the future.