Interactive Dashboard for Demand Response with Multiple Facilities

Karel Macek, Apurva Mohan, Jon Ho Huh Honeywell ACS Big Data Center of Excellence

Golden Valley, Minnesota, USA Apurva.Mohan@Honeywell.com

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

I. Need of Interactive Dashboard

Some companies operate owns numerous buildings where they do their business. A typical example of this is the retail stores. These companies are significant power consumers and therefore they are also important players at the power market, especially in the DR programs because they are able to bid really big curtailments and are able to ensure them, either with own personnel or by a servicing company. Some actions can be predefined or taken automatically. However, it is not easy to monitor all the variables that are considered. We consider at least (i) the actual power load and (ii) indoor temperatures because of comfort satisfaction monitoring. Considering 60 sites, with 5 zones and 24 time instants, we have minimally 7200 numbers. This huge amount of numbers cannot be shown in form of tables on a single screen or time series on. The operators however will appreciate the general overview of the whole situation, especially the critical and almost critical aspects. Another requirement is to keep the attention of the operators awaken for a longer time. The mentioned facts can be – of course – summarized in some tabular overview.

II. Basic Idea of the Dashboard

The invention addresses (i) presentation of relevant facts in the system, including the dynamic aspects, (ii) presentation of the facts in an attractive way, and (iii) possibility drill down and change the DR actions in particular buildings/zones. The main part of the dashboard is the pool of newts. Each facility is represented by a newt. The pool is practically a 2D scatter plot. One axis represents the average comfort in the zones. Two values are highlighted here: (i) usual comfort, e.g. 73 F and (ii) temporal comfort limit for the DR events, e.g. 75 F. The second axis has to express the power consumption. The axis has not absolute values; it is based on the 10 days benchmark of the last 10 days. Also here some limits can be considered. E.g. the original load (100%) and the target load (e.g. 85%).

The metaphor of newts does not make the dashboard more attractive for the user (a kind of gamification), it has also other

features that are useful for the addressed problem. The first one is the fact that newts move. The past movement is reflected by their tails. The tails expresses here the past values of given quantities. The size of the newt’s body expresses the benchmarked consumption of facility. It is obvious that the more important facilities – consumers – have to attract significantly more operators’ attention. The newt has head that express the intended future movement. In our case, this means the future evolution of the facility’s behavior that can be estimated from statistical models, including the variance. The variance can be expressed by legs or antennas. The newt has also spots that can express its internal state, e.g. how many chillers are running and at what stages. The eyes are the most sensitive part, therefore they will express if there exist at least one zone in the facility with a risk of discomfort.

Each zone can be potentially visualized in the same way as the facility. We do not propose this option by default because they would be too numerous. However, it is reasonable to allow the user to click on a newt representing the facility and visualize its family, i.e. the zones that belong to it. At this time all other facilities get less contrast colors. The hierarchy can be considered also at higher level than single facilities. All newts in the pool can be aggregated to the father newt. Everything is additive, therefore this aggregation is possible. The local menu, typically right click should be able to open also some detailed, more technical information about the facilities and zones, including the option of changing the behavior via setpoints or other actions. This could be done also for a group of selected newts.

It could happen that the newts will have very similar position and the pool gets unclear. In order to improve this, one can recommend a kind of zooming. However, much better could be a kind of nonlinear projection of the pool into another pool so the relationships between newts are kept and we do the transformation also with the limits of the original axes.

It is possible to consider also other dimensions, e.g. the ambient conditions like temperature or humidity. The newts can be shown in real geographic configuration. 3D pool could

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be considered too and the user could change the orientation of the pool.

Colors of the newts’ bodies and colors of the pool can be used for other purposes. The color of the background can be used for visualization of the game: how much we will win in the DR event. The operators will immediately see whether the things are going well or not. The newts’ body color can be used either for the overall comfort (instead of above proposed eyes) or the contribution to the DR profit.

List of novel features:

• The newt pool as a visualization tool for dynamic monitoring.

• Specific interpretation of the newts features.

This invention is not limited to the newts. Other animals can be considered too, especially when monitoring heterogeneous population.

III. Applicability

The tool will be denoted as interactive dashboard, offered typically to the operators on regular computer displays, but some modification for tablets or mobile phones can be considered as well. The dashboard can be extended also by other menus and options. Especially, the distribution of the estimated DR profit should be provided either as a probability density or in form of cumulative distribution function. The system can be equipped by a slider moving the whole pool in time backwards and forwards. The invention can be used also for fault detection and diagnostics. E.g. one can see that a facility has completely switched off all chillers, but is still consuming significant amount of power. Then – obviously – the situation shall be treated as a symptom and the facility should be checked out. Finally, the dashboard is dedicated to the DR programs where one decision maker has supervision over multiple facilities. However, the dashboard can be modified also for other monitoring tasks where: (i) multiple more or less homogenous objects are monitored (ii) have dynamical behavior that can be forecasted.

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