Geographic coordinate validation and assignment using an edge-constrained layout

Abstract Electric grids with buses that are mapped to geographic latitude and longitude are useful for a growing number of applications, such as data visualization, geomagnetically induced current calculations, and multi-energy coupled infrastructure simulations. This paper presents a methodology for validating the quality of geographic coordinates for a power system model, and to assign coordinates to buses with missing or low-quality coordinates. This method takes advantage of geographic indicators already intrinsic to a grid model, such as branch length as implied by impedance and susceptance parameters. The coordinate assignment process uses an approach inspired by graph drawing, that lays out the vertices (buses) and edges (transmission lines), formulated as a nonlinear programming problem with soft edge length constraints. The layout method is very computationally fast and scalable to large power system cases. The method is demonstrated in this paper using a 37-bus test case and a 6717-bus test case, both publicly available, along with a large actual grid model. The results show that, for cases with only a few errors in the coordinates, cases with no coordinates known beforehand, and others in between, this method is able to assign reasonable geographic coordinates to best match known data about the grid.