Visualizing complex energy planning objects with inherent flexibilities

Abstract

Energy distribution enterprises will face the challenge to plan and balance consumption and production in the electricity grid with the substantial amount of renewable energy sources (RES) [4]. To effectively plan and balance energy, a potential future energy enterprise will have to exploit flexibilities of individual energy consumers (and producers) to be able to delay certain loads of energy for some time interval. Such type of flexibility can be represented with a flex-offer from the MIRABEL project [1]. In this paper, we discuss energy planning and controlling activities within such future energy enterprise and, to support those activities, we propose a comprehensive visual analysis framework that provides detailed and generalized views over flex-offers, and offers a convenient OLAP-inspired approach to navigate and explore such data. Then, as the first step developing such framework, we focus on the detail view and present the implementation of the histogram-based approach to visualize a large number of individual flex-offers. Finally, we review the related work in the areas of the multidimensional, spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal, and energy data visualization, and present the future work.