OwlSim: Revolutionizing National Energy Policies Through Technology

COMP 410 in Collaboration with Citizens for Affordable Energy

Overview

• Introduction – COMP 410– Project Motivation– Project Objectives

• Simulation Framework• Energy Model and Plans• Demo • Conclusion• Questions

INTRODUCTION

About COMP 410

• “Software Engineering Methodology”• Design class satisfying computer science

Bachelors of Science Decree capstone requirement

• Typically taken by juniors and seniors• Warm-up project during first 3 weeks, then

semester-long project … with a real customer!• Student driven – no problem sets or lectures

Our Customer:Citizens for Affordable Energy

• CFAE is a national not-for-profit membership association

• Goal is to educate citizens and policymakers about non-partisan national energy solutions

• Leadership– John Hofmeister, Founder and CEO– Karen Hofmeister, Executive Director

Project Motivation

• U.S. has no long-term national energy policy• CFAE believes this could be disastrous• CFAE wants a software tool that can simulate

the long term effects of policies (or lack thereof)

• Shifting policy landscape mandates a very flexible simulator

Our Mission

• Create a mathematical model of the U.S. electric power generation and distribution

• Make a set of policies and assumptions for the next 50 years of the energy industry

• Develop a simulation framework to evaluate the effects of the plans based on the assumptions and the model

• Make the results accessible to the public• Make the framework flexible and extensible to allow

domain experts to change our assumptions and models

SIMULATION FRAMEWORK

Theoretical Design

• Modeling complex systems with mathematical functions

• Functions represented as modular “circuit elements” with inputs and outputs

• Functional modules can be “composited” – Encapsulate components of model– Allows composite modules with other modules inside.– Arbitrarily complicated models can be created– Diagram!

Capabilities

• Supports many simultaneous users• Scales with load• Basic use case– View model, plan, precomputed results

• Authenticated use case– Edit plan, recompute results, save results

• Expert Authenticated use case (if working)• System Administration use case (if working)– Publish results (if working)

ENERGY MODEL AND PLANS

High-Level Model

Worst-Case Plan

Average-Case Plan

Best-Case Plan

Comparison with Other Models

DEMO

Demo

• Connecting through web• Explain GUI• Basic use case– View model, plan, precomputed results

• Authenticated use case– Edit plan, recompute results, save results

• Expert Authenticated use case (if working)• System Administration use case (if working)– Publish results (if working)

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgements

• Citizens for Affordable Energy, John Hofmeister, Karen Hofmeister

• People we consulted for help• Microsoft for sponsorship• Steven Wong, Scott Rixner• TAs: • Team leads and all our hard-working students

QUESTIONS

Questions• Can’t this be done in Excel?

– Yes, simple test model could be done in Excel, but professionals could develop more complicated models. Excel doesn’t have centralized mechanism for managing results. Visualizing model, others can edit, maintainability, portability. Results is not only objective – also export.

• How can you develop model without domain knowledge?– Talked to experts, used recognized resources (EIA etc.). Simple

but reasonable model.• How did you choose Azure over other clouds?

– Had past support from Microsoft

Questions

• What was biggest technical challenge?• What was biggest non-technical challenge?• HTML5, other technology choices• Did you use curve fitting on historical data?

BACKUP

References

• EIA etc.