As our energy grid transitions to renewable sources the decision making and forecasting becomes ever more complex. Control room operators are overwhelmed with the magnitude of information that they have to deal with everyday. In our research we aim to enable expert energy (and other sectors) control room operators to make effective and efficient critical decisions particularly while under pressure. For this research we partner with AEMO (the Australian Energy Market Operator) to explore and develop the "Control Room of the Future" (CROF). We are actively growing this research to wider sectors, more control rooms both nationally and internationally.

Our research has involved understanding operator cognitive load (Afzal et al, 2022), detailed current practice, user-interface design and workshopping future opportunities (Goodwin et al, 2026). We always use a human-centred approach to understand the full picture and ensure the expert engineers and operators are involved and informed throughout the research and particularly design processes.

In our recent work with AEMO we have identified pain points, design vision principles, recommendations for future design practice and guidelines for visualisations for control rooms (published under the Goodwin et al, 2026 CSIRO Final Report Stage 5). Our continued work in this area explores innovative network diagrams and emerging display technologies to enable operators to perform their critical tasks anywhere, and with better spatial awareness of geographically dependent factors (such as weather and natural disasters) and the electrical grid.

Whilst studying the CROF, we have been using cutting edge eye-tracking glasses technology to capture data to better understand operators' attention to their displays and applications during typical control room operations. Our early research in this area inspired the development of a visualisation toolkit to allow us to perform detailed gaze analysis over arbitrary large multiview displays.

Publications and Media

• Goodwin, S., Vered, M., Gao, C., Lawrence, L., Tag, B., Wybrow, M., Wagner, M., Dwyer, T. & Zhang, Y. (2026) Final Report Stage 5: Topic 3 Control Room of the Future. May 2026, CSIRO Australian Research for Power Systems Transition.
• Hoang, M.K., Goodwin, S., Dargaville, R. & Dwyer, T. (2026) How Do Operators Use Network Diagrams? Characterising Visualisation Tasks in an Energy Control Room. CHI '26.
• Afzal, U., et al. (2022), Cognitive Load in Energy Network Control Rooms. Frontiers of Psychology.
• Goodwin, S., et al. (2022), VETA: Visual Eye-Tracking Analytics. Visual Informatics.
• Hoang, M.K., et al. (2023) Exploring the Benefits of Geography on Power Network Diagrams. EnergyVis 2023.