The design and implementation of solar analysis based on plug-in technology

Solar analysis function is the important indicator of modern civil construction and evaluation of environmental sustainable development, the increased buildings and the reduced space between buildings enhance the people's conflict of solar rights and residential environment problems. In order to safeguard the basic rights of the people and create a pleasant living condition for the citizen, it is necessary to put forward an effective method to measure the buildings' shadows, related solar analysis parameters, sunshine time, etc. The rapid development of 3D GIS, with its lifelike visual expression, powerful 3D analysis and operation functions, provides the solar analysis area a strong support. The traditional solar analysis software costs much on development, maintenance and modeling; has low independence and software portability and limited capability on function expansion. These limits couldn't match up to the need of true-3D GIS and the development of urban planning management. This paper aims at present the solar analysis module which based on plug-in technology and has successfully made it out. The thought of plug-in doesn't depend on specific software; the structure of "platform + plug-in" reduce the time of software development, giving the programmer more freedom to organize flexible functions. This paper has realized the accuracy and visualization requirement of solar analysis on the function: displaying the shadow of buildings, calculating sunshine hours and sunlight interval distance, drawing solar isochrones, solar conic surface and etc. At the end of the article, we show the results and which can clearly prove the advantage of this module. © 2010 IEEE.