Project Dixcrition: Dynamic Energy Map User Interface Design

Yujie Xu

The main interface (manySlider.py) enables user to view dynamic changes of heating and cooling demand of a conceptual urban environment setting.

The heating and cooling demand profile is generated from DOE benchmark building (post 1980) and is color coded with a two dimensional color ramp. The energy demand information is demonstrated with data plot on the right of the interface, the 3D urban space model on the top left and the "tick marks" on the lower left. The navigation between different time of year (one of the 8760 hours) is controlled by a series of sliders: one all-year-round slider on the bottom left and three stepped sliders that control jumping with specific steps of month, day and hour.

![Interface Layout of Dynamic Energy Demand Map] (https://github.com/yujiex/energyMap/blob/master/interfaceSnapshot/interface0720.png)

Testbed for data classification and representation

Yujie Xu

The primary purpose of this interface is to test the effectiveness of some color scheme and classification method on some randomly generated conceptual city layout. Originally it is a side-product of the data classification and visualization, but it might open up a new path in the future.

Each time the interface is launched, a random axa (default to be 10x10) city with specified urban density (default to be 30%) will be initialized, where a is the number of building lot on each side of the city, the default setting is 10x10. The energy demand profile is also retrieved from simulation of DOE benchmark models (post 1980). One can navigate through different time of year with a slider and four buttons on the bottom and visualize the color code for each time step.

For the current setting, the heating demand, and cooling demand data is classified with "quantile" method into 7 categories. The color of the building is then decided with the categories the heating and cooling demand belongs to. For example, if a building consumes 100 kbtu heating energy and 90 kbtu of cooling energy at time t. The classification breakpoint for heating is [0, 200, 300] and the breakpoint for cooling is [0, 50, 100], then the heating category for this building at time t is 0 and the cooling category for the building at time t is 1, so the color for the building is the color depicted at the 1st row 0th column in the 2d color ramp.

![Interface Layout of Dynamic Energy Demand Map] (https://github.com/yujiex/energyMap/blob/master/interfaceSnapshot/randCity.png)