Background
The IDLES (Integrated Development of Low-carbon Energy Systems) programme (2018-2023), funded by EPSRC and hosted by Energy Futures Lab, develops soft-linked modelling tools to support long-term energy system planning for net zero. Within this, the Gridlington project integrates several tools to showcase research, focusing on the role of demand-side response in grid operations at both system and local levels by linking four subsystems (models of investment in the electricity system, electricity networks, agent-based demand models, and intra-day balancing markets). The current challenge is building a visualisation framework to connect subsystem outputs and make data more accessible. Once developed, this will allow researchers to present scenarios interactively to visitors and stakeholders, providing a key output of the IDLES programme and helping maximise the real-world impact of its research.
Our Contribution
Visualising the Gridlington scenarios brought a number of unique challenges. The Gridlington Demonstrator room contains 8 screens connected to 4 different computers, the goal was to be able to control what appears on those screens from one central point for displaying scenarios to stakeholders. This was achieved using the 51³Ô¹ÏÍø-developed tool - a software designed for running large-scale visualisations in the Data Observatory in 51³Ô¹ÏÍø's Data Science Institute. Our use case for this tool was unique and required collaborating with the OVE development team to ensure it would work for us. The tool included web-based dashboards displaying data on all 8 of the screens as well as a controller page that would be connected to via a tablet device used by the demonstrator.
There was a second component to this project that was to create a central point through which the visualisation tool could communicate with all of the models. This was developed using and deployed in a docker container so that the models and visualisation tool could communicate with it via RESTful APIs.