Student project/ Master's Thesis: Energy Efficient Building Design

Description

The Geospatial Visualization, Semantic Modelling, and Acquisition Group at the VRVis Forschungs-GmbH in Vienna, Austria, is looking for support from a student (f/m/d) who would like to experience application oriented research at Austria’s leading non-university research center in the field of visual computing and/or aims to give her/his master’s thesis an application driven focus with the following topic:

Visualization of a Building Energy Modelling (BEM) Network

Energy efficient planned buildings are necessary to tackle the impact of human kind on our environment, by reducing energy and material consumption. To develop an efficient energy concept, various material compositions and heating profiles have to be tested. To detect weak points in the planning phase the heat transfer between the rooms can be visualized by an abstract room-network. The network consists of rooms (nodes) with known / calculated temperatures and heatsources. Transfer surfaces (edges) establish connections between rooms and provide information of its material composition, surface temperatures, and various physical parameters.

Tasks

In this project, a student is expected to conceptualize a graph representing energy flows generated from a room network of a Building Energy Modelling (BEM) application. The student will research a web-based interactive visualization of the graph to detect strong / weak points of the current concept. The nodes (rooms) and edges (transfer area) as well as simulation data are provided by VRVis.

The following questions should be addressed:

• What graph layout is suitable for room networks? How to sustain spatial embedding? How to distinguish indoor from outdoor rooms?
• How to encode multivariate information into nodes and edges?
• Which questions do energy planners typically have about the data?
• Which interaction techniques support the user to solve these questions?
• How can variations, or different designs, be compared to each other (only attributes change - not the network structure itself)?

Requirements

• Strong interest in visualization and user interaction
• Solid programming skills
• Experience with web technologies (JavaScript, d3, Cytoscape.js) is strongly recommended
• Knowledge of graph data structures and graph theory is advised
• More knowledge always welcome ;-)

Contact@VRVis

Please contact Mr. Andreas Walch (walch@vrvis.at) for more details about the project or directly forward your application!

We especially want to encourage female students to apply, for we wish to actively counter the lack of women researchers in the IT-industry.

Besides professional mentoring we offer remuneration upon successful (thesis) completion. For female students there is the option to jointly apply for a FEMtech internship grant.