At the ACRNA Conference in Sydney last October, Dr Sarah Goodwin from Monash University ran a workshop called Designing the Control Room of the Future, giving attendees a look into research being carried out with CSIRO and AEMO under the Australian Research in Power Systems Transition program.
That workshop fed into a broader piece of work exploring how better information visualisation and interface design can improve situational awareness and decision making in control rooms. The research combines control room observations, eye tracking, live and training environment comparisons, and workshops including the one held at our conference.
The interim findings, released in December 2025, identify:
- Seven pain points affecting control room operators today, spanning inconsistent interfaces, frequent application switching, limited automation support, and training environments that do not fully match live operations.
- Five design principles for the control room of the future: interfaces that are flexible yet consistent, information that surfaces without hunting for it, one underlying data model feeding every screen, automation for what is already certain, and AI suggestions that come with clear, human readable explanations.
- Ten recommendations grouped into three areas: improving visualisation and interaction, building unified context aware systems, and integrating context aware solutions such as explainable AI guidance and smarter single line diagrams.
While the research is grounded in AEMO’s energy control rooms, the team believes the findings apply well beyond energy, including transport, water, and emergency services environments.
The final report is due shortly, and the team is preparing a short survey inviting ACRNA members to help reprioritise the recommendations based on their own operational experience. The project has also secured funding for a new stage of work, extending into intelligent network diagrams.
Read the full interim report on CSIRO’s website: Topic 3, Control Room of the Future.
These themes will come up again at our own conference. On Day 2, Adrian Cullen from the National AI Centre is running a two and a half hour interactive workshop, AI in the Control Room: Beyond the Hype, covering real world AI applications, how AI can strengthen situational awareness and decision making, and the risks and governance questions that come with it. If this article has you thinking about where control rooms are heading, this session picks up right where it leaves off.
We will share the survey and further updates as they come through.
2026 Conference (September 1st – 2nd) registrations are open now at www.acrna.org/conference