Identifying and visualizing technology evolution: A case study of smart grid technology

This paper attempts to illustrate the technology evolution for describing the emergence, development, or demise of a technology field. The basic idea is to divide a technology field into tight-knit communities over time and track their inter-year continuity. Then the evolving trajectories are presented through visualizing the timeline plot where each community is drawn as a function of its size, average age, and time. Analyzing a set of patents related to smart grid, we found that this technology consists of several trajectories. Among them, the subjects of network management and e-commerce are relatively young and active. The power system recently has emerged owing to the joining of integration and management concepts. As aging subjects, wireless communication system receives more attention than wired one does. The proposed timeline plot gives insights into evolving trajectories, from which the structure of the technology could be investigated and certain emerging subjects might be figured out. Such understandings are essential information to experts who endeavor to profile technology development and keep up with current trends. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.