Data visualization library

In recent years, with the increasing development of energy simulation tools, there has been a growing need to create data visualizations of simulation results to support the decision-making process in building design.

Supporting designers in the early stages of designing buildings, in fact, is strategic to ensure load reduction while still considering the household practices and enhancing the indoor environmental quality. To achieve these objectives, it is necessary to make use of effective building energy modelling with a clear interpretation of the simulation results, thus allowing effective communication between the design team and the involved disciplines/stakeholders.

On the one hand many studies show how a clear, smart and reproducible data visualization facilitates the communication of ideas and findings to users, but on the other hand, no standardized way of visualizing simulation results has been defined yet.

As part of the EU-funded project Cultural-E, a library for data post-processing and visualization methodologies for simulation-aided design, has been developed. The library applies to plus energy residential building simulation model. It aims to show a clear and shared methodology to effectively communicate building energy and indoor environment quality performance to building designers by collecting custom and ready-made scripting for simulation input report and output post-processing in a standardized way.

The library makes the whole process efficient, starting from the geometric model setting, the related input and output, to the dynamic and analytical visualization of data.

As a first step, a survey was disseminated among European designers to identify the meaningful performance indicators as well as which aspects of building performance evaluation they need to investigate the most. Thanks to the information collected, a Data Visualisation Library has been developed. The library generates interactive charts and produces an output report with clear interpretation keys starting from basic hourly output data series.

Multiple benefits and results can be observed from this new and standardized method of data visualization.

• By standardizing the simulation data post- processing from model design to final report visualization, the building analysis process is simplified, providing useful guidance through the different stages of the design process.
• Standardized data visualizations for unambiguous and communication
• It also allows comparative assessments across multiple buildings and enables effective communication between the design team and the disciplines/stakeholders involved, making this process more streamlined.
• It is also considered to be an interactive tool because of the contribution coming from the users especially regarding some missing input information that cannot be automatically generated as well as personal interpretations of the graphs to integrate the descriptive information already present.

To read the results of the study please visit the project website.