EnergyViz: an interactive system for visualization of energy systems

• DOI: 10.1007/s00371-015-1186-8
• Publication Date: 2015-11-25T09:22:15Z
• Authors: Haleh Alemasoom; Faramarz Samavati; John Brosz; David Layzell
• Keywords: 13. Climate action; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; 7. Clean energy

Energy systems are under pressure to transform to address concerns about climate change. The modeling and visualization of energy systems can play an important role in communicating the costs, benefits and trade-offs of energy systems choices. We introduce EnergyViz, a visualization system that provides an interface for exploring time-varying, multi-attribute and spatial properties of a particular energy system. EnergyViz integrates several visualization techniques to facilitate exploration of a particular energy system. These techniques include flow diagram representation to show energy flow, 3D interaction with flow diagrams for expanding viewable data attributes such as emissions and an interactive map integrated with flow diagrams for simultaneous exploration of spatial and abstract information. We also perform level-of-detail exploration on flow diagrams and use smooth animation across the visualizations to represent time-varying data. Finally, we include evaluation results of EnergyViz collected from expert and inexperienced participants.