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At least 523 records · Page 29

DINGO: Digital assistant to grid operators for resilience management of power distribution system

With increasing adverse weather events and disasters, enabling resiliency of the power distribution system (PDS) is becoming increasingly important. Here in this work, resiliency is defined as the systems ability to keep supplying critical loads even with multiple contingencies. Resiliency may depend on: (a) advanced tools to assist operators in situational awareness and decision making with the increasing volume of data generated by the PDS, (b) visualization and ease of interaction with system resources and information, especially during extreme events and resulting human operator stress, and (c) flexible resources and autonomous control. Operators and support engineers need to interact with the system for key information and take action under stress, given the requirement for decisions in a short time. Integrated technological solutions are prevailing steps to support the most appropriate decision during critical times to serve essential loads. In order to meet the required goals, a Real-time Resiliency Monitoring and Operational Decision Support (RT-RMOD) tool have been developed. It supports various functionalities, including real-time monitoring, resilience assessment, and proactive decision support. However, this work makes advanced feature additions to the tool by developing data-enabled resilience management algorithms for (i) outage detection and localization, (ii) Resiliency-metric driven restoration and reconfiguration, and (iii) NLP based digital assistant for operators called DINGO (DIgital assistaNt to Grid Operators) to interact with Advanced Distribution Management System (ADMS) and RT-RMOD. The developed algorithm was validated for multiple cases of weather events using a real-world, off-grid microgrid system modeled in a real-time simulator, sensor data, and software tools.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

TreeSAPP: the Tree-based Sensitive and Accurate Phylogenetic Profiler

Microbial communities drive matter and energy transformations integral to global biogeochemical cycles, yet many taxonomic groups facilitating these processes remain poorly represented in biological sequence databases. Due to this missing information, taxonomic assignment of sequences from environmental genomes remains inaccurate. We present the Tree-based Sensitive and Accurate Phylogenetic Profiler (TreeSAPP) software for functionally and taxonomically classifying genes, reactions and pathways from genomes of cultivated and uncultivated microorganisms using reference packages representing coding sequences mediating multiple globally relevant biogeochemical cycles. TreeSAPP uses linear regression of evolutionary distance on taxonomic rank to improve classifications, assigning both closely related and divergent query sequences at the appropriate taxonomic rank. TreeSAPP is able to provide quantitative functional and taxonomic classifications for both assembled and unassembled sequences and files supporting interactive tree of life visualizations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

75 Years of Drift: The changing meaning of phasor [History]

The origin of what electrical engineers call a phasor diagram is explored, and traced to a treatise by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Peter Tait. The diagram was mechanical in origin, and gave a geometrical way to visualize and calculate the interactions of sinusoidal motions. Originally, the words radius vector were used in association with the diagram. Later authors used vector. As work on electromagnetic fields expanded, the word phasor was introduced to replace it. That change came about as a result of a deliberate effort (in 1944) to have a clear and unambiguous term of art. Since then, the meaning of the word has changed, and the geometrical interpretation has fallen out of favor. Unfortunately, clarity and unambiguity have suffered as a result. Newer meanings are examined. The measurement of phase angle in the electric power system is described. An Appendix on the work of Steinmetz shows that he did not favor the phasor representation.

Vector, Phasor, Phasor Measurement Unit↗

CGSim: A Simulation Framework for Large Scale Distributed Computing Environment

Large-scale distributed computing infrastructures such as the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG) require comprehensive simulation tools for evaluating performance, testing new algorithms, and optimizing resource allocation strategies. However, existing simulators suffer from limited scalability, hardwired algorithms, lack of real-time monitoring, and inability to generate datasets suitable for modern machine learning approaches. We present CGSim, a simulation framework for large-scale distributed computing environments that addresses these limitations. Built upon the validated SimGrid simulation framework, CGSim provides high-level abstractions for modeling heterogeneous grid environments while maintaining accuracy and scalability. Key features include a modular plugin mechanism for testing custom workflow scheduling and data movement policies, interactive real-time visualization dashboards, and automatic generation of event-level datasets suitable for AI-assisted performance modeling. We demonstrate CGSim’s capabilities through a comprehensive evaluation using production ATLAS PanDA workloads, showing significant calibration accuracy improvements across WLCG computing sites. Scalability experiments show near-linear scaling for multi-site simulations, with distributed workloads achieving 6 × better performance compared to single-site execution. The framework enables researchers to simulate WLCG-scale infrastructures with hundreds of sites and thousands of concurrent jobs within practical time budget constraints on commodity hardware.

Vatsavai, Sairam Sri [Brookhaven National Laborato↗

WELLS Database

The Wellbore Exploration and Location Logistic System (WELLS) is a living national wellbore database - created and maintained by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). This resource contains more than seven million public wellbore records from state, federal, and tribal resources. Sourced from over 65 authoritative, yet disparate resources, the WELLS Database combines and synthesizes well data from oil, gas, underground injection, research, geothermal, geotechnical, groundwater and other types of wells in a single, unified system. This resource can be explored and visualized through the WELLS Interactive Application, also on EDX: https://edx.netl.doe.gov/dataset/wells-interactive-application The WELLS Database (formerly titled CO2-Locate) is an integrated national well dataset, representing open-source wellbore data from disparate state, tribal, and federal entities. The database provides publicly available well header data with key attributes such as well age, depth, and status. The database contains a fully integrated CSV file with all values in numerical columns, such as depth, converted into numbers. This version has a NETL derived API (American Petroleum Institute) number column and has been handled for redundancies, resulting in one record for every unique API number. The database also contains a fully integrated CSV file, where all original data are kept as text values. Additionally, the database includes a shapefile containing key attributes and coordinates from the integrated dataset, reformatted public wells CSV files, and a proprietary well density grid shapefile. Notes for consideration: The WELLS Database will be updated periodically with new datasets and information. A field dictionary with field (i.e., attribute) coverage across acquired public well resources, and the resulting integrated public well datasets are available in the spreadsheet, WELLS_Field_Dictionary.xlsx. Summary layers provided in this database are derived from proprietary layers and do not always contain key features (status, type, true vertical depth, or spud year) and therefore might not be shown when data are queried for those features.

AS↗

Open Source Platform for Live Processing of High Data Rate Electron Microscopy (SBIR Phase I Award Topic 15, Subtopic B, Final Scientific / Technical Report)

4D scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is experiencing a revolution both in terms of data size, and data veracity, as are many other areas of experimental data acquisition. This presents enormous opportunities to make new scientific discoveries, but is also hamstrung by aging software that is no longer fit for purpose. Experimental data acquisition platforms must make the same investments in software infrastructure that the simulation community made decades ago to take advantage of high-performance computing (HPC) if they hope to realize the full potential of the latest advances made in detector technology. This requires rethinking the design and deployment of hardware, moving away from small, fixed commodity computing capabilities with closed interfaces to open, modular, scalable systems designed for parallelism and throughput. The technical approach will leverage best-in-class open source technologies, and develop new approaches strategically to build an open source platform for experimental data acquisition targeting high data rate electron microscopy. The project will develop a software platform that uses the power and performance of modern HPC resources to ingest the large volume of data produced by electron microscopes using direct electron detectors. A set of configurable pipelines will be used to enable the processing to be tailored to the problem being investigated with builtin visualization of data at interactive rates. This project will leverage investments made by the DOE and other agencies to provide a powerful software platform for the experimental data community working with most powerful electron microscopes, such as 4D STEM detectors. It will create a platform that serves as a reference for the community. Permissive open source licensing will make the platform available to all, with a simple deployment strategy offering the ability to keep data close to where it is generated. This advanced software platform will require customization for each deployment, creating opportunities for software services that are typically offered to extend open source software platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

AMPP-4 Metric Dashboard

The AMPP-4 Metric Dashboard is an interactive tool used for visualizing key performance indicators and milestones for the various teams in the Material Recovery & Recycle (AMPP-4) group. This dashboard provides current group data for FY25 tracking purposes. The dashboard is organized by various chapters: 1) AMPP-4 overview, 2) Scheduling, and 3) individual chapters for each team. AMPP-4 supports 7 teams, where the day- and swing-shift aqueous demolition teams are treated as one team for the purpose of metric tracking. The dashboard is used internally to monitor the success and health of the AMPP-4 teams. Additionally, the dashboard can be used externally to support programmatic reporting to sponsors and aid in future milestone and work package planning.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

What Is the Agent Doing? Visualizing Agentic AI Querying Workflows

We explore how visualizations can help users understand what an AI agent is doing as it builds and runs queries over data. As part of the LinkQ system, a natural language interface for querying knowledge graphs with a large language model (LLM), we designed two complementary views: A State Diagram that shows where the agent is within a larger workflow, and a Live Action Display that gives real-time updates about the agent's current task. In a study with 14 practitioners, we found that these visuals helped participants build stronger mental models of the agent's behavior while also increasing their confidence in the system. However, we also observed that users sometimes trusted incorrect outputs simply because the agent appeared to be doing the "right" thing. Our findings point to both the value and risk of visualizing agent behavior in interactive AI systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Threat Reduction Research Networks: Fostering Sustainable Collaborations Through Trainings for Genomics for Biosurveillance

Scientific research communities can be represented as heterogeneous or multidimensional networks encompassing multiple types of entities and relationships. These networks might include researchers, institutions, meetings, and publications, connected by relationships like authorship, employment, and attendance. We describe a method for efficiently and flexibly capturing, storing, and extracting information from multidimensional scientific networks using a graph database. The database structure is based on an ontology that captures allowable types of entities and relationships. This allows us to construct a variety of projections of the underlying multidimensional graph through database queries to answer specific research questions. We demonstrate this process through a study of the U.S. Biological Threat Reduction Program (BTRP), which seeks to develop Threat Reduction Networks to build and strengthen a sustainable international community of biosecurity, biosafety, and biosurveillance experts to address shared biological threat reduction challenges. Networks like these create connectional intelligence among researchers and institutions around the world, and are central to the concept of cooperative threat reduction. Our analysis focuses on a series of seven BTRP genome sequencing training workshops, showing how they created a growing network of participants and countries over time, which is also reflected in coauthorship relationships among attendees. By capturing concept and relationship hierarchies, our ontology-based approach allows us to pose general or specific questions about networks within the same framework. This approach can be applied to other research communities or multidimensional social networks to capture, analyze, and visualize different types of interactions and how they change over time.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Stability and transition of three-dimensional flows

The role of secondary instabilities in the transition to turbulence in three-dimensional boundary layers (especially in swept-wing flows) is characterized, reviewing the results of recent theoretical and experimental investigations. Consideration is given to cross-flow vortices, boundary-layer profile measurements, flow visualization, spanwise wavelength determinations, interactions, problems involving rotating disks and cones, and leading-edge contamination. All of the flows investigated are shown to exhibit streamwise vorticity and to depend strongly on initial conditions.

Reed, H. L.↗

VSTOL ground effects testing with flow visualization and image enhancement

A remotely controlled high-energy fiber-optic light delivery technique is employed to examine the implementation of a laser-light-sheet flow-visualization system. During testing, video data are enhanced in real time using digital image processing techniques. A summary of test results for an advanced VSTOL configuration in ground effect, and techniques for the generation of 3D reconstructions for the flowfield are outlined. The system performed well during all phases of the test and proved to be an extremely useful asset to the overall test program. The most useful application of the flow visualization system was the interactive real-time flow field analysis made during the actual testing.

Kegelman, Jerome T.↗

CAGI: Computer Aided Grid Interface. A work in progress

Progress realized in the development of a Computer Aided Grid Interface (CAGI) software system in integrating CAD/CAM geometric system output and/or Interactive Graphics Exchange Standard (IGES) files, geometry manipulations associated with grid generation, and robust grid generation methodologies is presented. CAGI is being developed in a modular fashion and will offer fast, efficient and economical response to geometry/grid preparation, allowing the ability to upgrade basic geometry in a step-by-step fashion interactively and under permanent visual control along with minimizing the differences between the actual hardware surface descriptions and corresponding numerical analog. The computer code GENIE is used as a basis. The Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) representation of sculptured surfaces is utilized for surface grid redistribution. The computer aided analysis system, PATRAN, is adapted as a CAD/CAM system. The progress realized in NURBS surface grid generation, the development of IGES transformer, and geometry adaption using PATRAN will be presented along with their applicability to grid generation associated with rocket propulsion applications.

Soni, Bharat K.↗

Intelligent systems and advanced user interfaces for design, operation, and maintenance of command management systems

Historically, command management systems (CMS) have been large and expensive spacecraft-specific software systems that were costly to build, operate, and maintain. Current and emerging hardware, software, and user interface technologies may offer an opportunity to facilitate the initial formulation and design of a spacecraft-specific CMS as well as to develop a more generic CMS system. New technologies, in addition to a core CMS common to a range of spacecraft, may facilitate the training and enhance the efficiency of CMS operations. Current mission operations center (MOC) hardware and software include Unix workstations, the C/C++ programming languages, and an X window interface. This configuration provides the power and flexibility to support sophisticated and intelligent user interfaces that exploit state-of-the-art technologies in human-machine interaction, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. One of the goals of this research is to explore the extent to which technologies developed in the research laboratory can be productively applied in a complex system such as spacecraft command management. Initial examination of some of these issues in CMS design and operation suggests that application of technologies such as intelligent planning, case-based reasoning, human-machine systems design and analysis tools (e.g., operator and designer models), and human-computer interaction tools (e.g., graphics, visualization, and animation) may provide significant savings in the design, operation, and maintenance of the CMS for a specific spacecraft as well as continuity for CMS design and development across spacecraft. The first six months of this research saw a broad investigation by Georgia Tech researchers into the function, design, and operation of current and planned command management systems at Goddard Space Flight Center. As the first step, the researchers attempted to understand the current and anticipated horizons of command management systems at Goddard. Preliminary results are given on CMS commonalities and causes of low re-use, and methods are proposed to facilitate increased re-use.

Potter, William J.↗

Flow-visualization study of the X-29A aircraft at high angles of attack using a 1/48-scale model

A water-tunnel study on a 1/48-scale model of the X-29A aircraft was performed at the NASA Dryden Flow Visualization Facility. The water-tunnel test enhanced the results of the X-29A flight tests by providing flow-visualization data for comparison and insights into the aerodynamic characteristics of the aircraft. The model was placed in the water tunnel at angles of attack of 20 to 55 deg. and with angles of sideslip from 0 to 5 deg. In general, flow-visualization techniques provided useful information on vortex formation, separation, and breakdown and their role in yaw asymmetries and tail buffeting. Asymmetric forebody vortices were observed at angles of attack greater than 30 deg. with 0 deg. sideslip and greater than 20 deg. with 5 deg. sideslip. While the asymmetric flows observed in the water tunnel did not agree fully with the flight data, they did show some of the same trends. In addition, the flow visualization indicated that the interaction of forebody vortices and the wing wake at angles of attack between 20 and 35 deg. may cause vertical-tail buffeting observed in flight.

Cotton, Stacey J.↗

Intelligent Systems and Advanced User Interfaces for Design, Operation, and Maintenance of Command Management Systems

Historically Command Management Systems (CMS) have been large, expensive, spacecraft-specific software systems that were costly to build, operate, and maintain. Current and emerging hardware, software, and user interface technologies may offer an opportunity to facilitate the initial formulation and design of a spacecraft-specific CMS as well as a to develop a more generic or a set of core components for CMS systems. Current MOC (mission operations center) hardware and software include Unix workstations, the C/C++ and Java programming languages, and X and Java window interfaces representations. This configuration provides the power and flexibility to support sophisticated systems and intelligent user interfaces that exploit state-of-the-art technologies in human-machine systems engineering, decision making, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. One of the goals of this research is to explore the extent to which technologies developed in the research laboratory can be productively applied in a complex system such as spacecraft command management. Initial examination of some of the issues in CMS design and operation suggests that application of technologies such as intelligent planning, case-based reasoning, design and analysis tools from a human-machine systems engineering point of view (e.g., operator and designer models) and human-computer interaction tools, (e.g., graphics, visualization, and animation), may provide significant savings in the design, operation, and maintenance of a spacecraft-specific CMS as well as continuity for CMS design and development across spacecraft with varying needs. The savings in this case is in software reuse at all stages of the software engineering process.

Mitchell, Christine M.↗

Helicopter Human Factors

Even under optimal conditions, helicopter flight is a most demanding form of human-machine interaction, imposing continuous manual, visual, communications, and mental demands on pilots. It is made even more challenging by small margins for error created by the close proximity of terrain in NOE flight and missions flown at night and in low visibility. Although technology advances have satisfied some current and proposed requirements, hardware solutions alone are not sufficient to ensure acceptable system performance and pilot workload. However, human factors data needed to improve the design and use of helicopters lag behind advances in sensor, display, and control technology. Thus, it is difficult for designers to consider human capabilities and limitations when making design decisions. This results in costly accidents, design mistakes, unrealistic mission requirements, excessive training costs, and challenge human adaptability. NASA, in collaboration with DOD, industry, and academia, has initiated a program of research to develop scientific data bases and design principles to improve the pilot/vehicle interface, optimize training time and cost, and maintain pilot workload and system performance at an acceptable level. Work performed at Ames, and by other research laboratories, will be reviewed to summarize the most critical helicopter human factors problems and the results of research that has been performed to: (1) Quantify/model pilots use of visual cues for vehicle control; (2) Improve pilots' performance with helmet displays of thermal imagery and night vision goggles for situation awareness and vehicle control; (3) Model the processes by which pilots encode maps and compare them to the visual scene to develop perceptually and cognitively compatible electronic map formats; (4) Evaluate the use of spatially localized auditory displays for geographical orientation, target localization, radio frequency separation; (5) Develop and flight test control/display concepts; (6) Quantify, model, predict, and improve pilots, workload-management strategies; and (7) Design computer-game trainers to reduce training time and cost.

Hart, Sandra G.↗

A Taxonomic Classification Approach for Global Spatio-temporal Data

The World Bank, World Health Organization, and other major vendors collectively provide thousands of global time series datasets that focus on issues of the environment, public health, economics, violence, education, and national security. Sorting these data into meaningful information requires the use of data mining techniques to cluster trends into an orderly and manageable number of cases. The World SpatioTemporal Analytics and Mapping (WSTAMP) project database (wstamp.ornl.gov) was developed to spatiotemporally harmonize global vendor data (23,300+ attributes, 200+ locations, 50+ years). Within the WSTAMP analytical environment, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) has been a highly effective data-driven approach for clustering and mapping these time series into national spatiotemporal behavior maps. Two significant properties have surfaced from this work. First, several recognizable cluster patterns have emerged and persist across a range of locations, attributes, and time frames (e.g., increasing, decreasing, rebounding, peak, oscillating). Secondly, practitioners engaging WSTAMP have noted the explanatory and anticipatory value of these patterns and articulated particular interest in detecting them within the spatiotemporal cube. This need was addressed by shifting DTW-based clustering from an open ended, data-driven implementation to a taxonomic pattern matching approach. This paper presents the method including implementation strategies for visualization and human computer interaction and applies the approach to a sample data set and concludes with next steps.

Stewart, Robert↗

An Integrated Testbed for Trojans in Printed Circuit Boards with Fuzzing Capabilities

This paper showcases an all-in-one testing environment that combines Trojan detection and fuzzing capabilities for printed circuit boards using the OpenPLC “NYU Trojan Edition” and a dedicated Trojan detection framework. The demo system is self-contained and equipped with two OpenPLC-based boards (one with a Trojan and one without), and automated tools for inserting the Trojan and collecting side-channel data. We developed a graphical user interface for interactive Trojan selection, data visualization, and anomaly detection analysis.

Trojan detection, anomaly detection, PCB, timing l↗