An environmental information system for the exploration of energy systems

Abstract

The transition to renewable energy sources requires extensive changes to the energy system infrastructure, ranging from individual households to the national scale. During this transition, stakeholders must be able to make informed decisions, researchers need to investigate possible options and analyse scenarios, and the public should be informed about developments and options for future infrastructure. The data and parameters required for this are manifold and it is often difficult to create an overview of the current situation for a region of interest. We propose an environmental information system for the visualisation and exploration of large collections of heterogeneous data in the scope of energy system infrastructure and subsurface geological energy storage technologies. Based on the study area of Schleswig-Holstein, a federal state in Germany, we have set up a virtual geographic environment integrating GIS data, topographical models, subsurface information, and simulation results. The resulting application allows users to explore data collection within a unified context in 3D space, interact with datasets, and watch animations of selected simulation scenarios to gain a better understanding of the complex interactions of processes and datasets. Based on the cross-platform game engine Unity, our framework can be used on regular PCs, head-mounted displays, and virtual reality environments and can support domain scientists during assessment and exploration of the data, encourages discussions and is an effective means for outreach activities and presentations for stakeholders or the interested public.

Prototype of a Virtual Experiment Information System for the Mont Terri Underground Research Laboratory

“…Our prototype of a VEIS is based on the framework of an Environmental Information System originally developed for hydrological applications (Rink et al, 2020;2022a) and recently extended for including geotechnical data (Blecha et al, 2019;Rink et al, 2022b). An overview of the general application setup and the integrated data is given in Figure 1.…”

“…All OpenGeoSys tools are open-source 13 and provide various interfaces for the integration and conversion of common data formats in geosciences (e.g., GIS formats and GOCAD). Then, a large variety of postprocessing and visualisation techniques has been applied, such as clipping of the geometry, the extraction of (contour) surfaces and parameters, projections and the colourisation (see Rink et al (2022b) for details). Next, the data has been exported as geometrical objects in the glTF-fileformat (Bhatia et al, 2017).…”

Digitalisation for nuclear waste management: predisposal and disposal

“…4 There is a need for developing and harmonising XR concepts for various URLs across Europe-also to support an overarching DT concept. Moreover, XR capabilities are needed for other geotechnical application areas such as geothermal energy systems (Rink et al 2022). Therefore, various geoscientific application areas will greatly benefit from generalised XR concepts and software tools.…”

A game engine based application for visualising and analysing environmental spatiotemporal mobile sensor data in an urban context

“…Unity allows developers to produce a stereoscopic 3D build of their applications. We used the VisLab configuration component of UFZ-Unity-Framework for easy adaptations (Rink et al, 2022a;Rink et al, 2022b). This framework can be used to create Unity scenes by importing heterogeneous environmental data, assign visualization properties to them, and interact with this data by extending the predefined UI components.…”