Dynamic Online 3D Visualization Framework for Real-Time Energy Simulation Based on 3D Tiles

Abstract

Energy co-simulation can be used to analyze the dynamic energy consumption of a building or a region, which is essential for decision making in the planning and management of smart cities. To increase the accessibility of energy simulation results, a dynamic online 3D city model visualization framework based on 3D Tiles is proposed in this paper. Two types of styling methods are studied, attribute-based and ID map-based. We first perform the energy co-simulation and save the results in CityGML format with EnergyADE. Then the 3D geometry data of these city objects are combined with its simulation results as attributes or just with object ID information to generate Batched 3D Models (B3DM) in 3D Tiles. Next, styling strategies are pre-defined and can be selected by end-users to show different scenarios. Finally, during the visualization process, dynamic interactions and data sources are integrated into the styling generation to support real-time visualization. This framework is implemented with Cesium. Compared with existing dynamic online 3D visualization framework such as directly styling or Cesium Language (CZML), a JSON format for describing a time-dynamic graphical scene, primarily for display in a web browser running Cesium, the proposed framework is more flexible and has higher performance in both data transmission and rendering which is essential for real-time GIS applications.