Digital Cartographic Generalization in Spatial Databases: application issues in Power Grids CAD tools

Abstract

This work presents the results of applying several digital cartographic generalization techniques to improve the performance of an Electrical Power Grids Computer-Aided-Design application. The performance increase is attained by adjusting the level of detail of the grid topology being visualized in the CAD application. This adjustment takes place at the database level using a multi-scale architecture and the available spatial extensions of Geographic Information Systems databases. The data volume is minimized to fit the exact requirements of the scale being used in the visualization so that no processing time is wasted on representing irrelevant elements. Results show that up to a 90 % of the data can be skipped and thus, a 84 % of the time required to render the visualization can be saved on average, enabling the CAD application to render it in real-time. Furthermore, the optical legibility of the grid visualization is enhanced as a consequence of applying cartographic generalization.