Seeing by Degrees: Programming Visualization From Sensor Networks

Abstract

In order to create baseline conditions for building energy performance, make a setting adjustment or determine optimal operating parameters, it is often necessary to view a large series of history data from a building control and management system. However, viewing large amounts of data in tables and charts is not a useful procedure to find significant patterns and information for an energy team. A new approach at AEA adds a programming engineer to the normal energy analysis team who manages data and programs visualization tools to speed analysis. This paper addresses the potential effectiveness of such an addition to the typical building operations (optimization) project team. The programming engineer confronts issues in two directions. First is the nature of the data as it is captured and stored, which establishes various data processing steps that are necessary to produce an automated acquisition system to the server. For the second direction, the programming engineer must adapt to the needs of the project team: what kinds of questions are the building engineers asking, how does data need to be aggregated, and how can it best be visualized. The paper considers how, in order to produce useful data tools, the programming engineer is confronted with having to learn and appreciate the kinds of questions asked by other disciplines on the project team.