I work in research (uni) and am writing a framework for heat processes to optimize their costs. This goes both for private houses and industrial processes. The goal is to enable industry players to see that/when renewable energies and heat reuse with heat pumps are cheaper than fossil fuels. I do this using digital twins for components and on a system level.
My boss hesitates because he thinks this must already exist. I want to pursue that path with my research, so any insights there are welcome, too, but this is primarily about the open-source project.
I searched GitHub and came up empty, but that is only a subset of the search. Do you have any idea how I can find this, one way or another? It would also be great if I could show that it likely does not exist.
Github is one of many public software repositories like Gitlab, Codeberg, sourcehut… You could search there also.
its the black swan problem of induction. no definitive solution has yet been found; in fact iirc the possibility of a perfect solution has been disproven. this impossibility can be and has been used to justify any number of absurd and improbable positions, notably religion. you will have to settle for ‘good enough’ on this one. also, if the competition already exists in this space and is so hard to find, then the niche for your project seems open.
Just so you know, my boss and I work in computer science, so your insights are well-received and understood.
So, can you now elaborate on showing that it likely does not exist?
the best you can do is make the best effort you can think of. industry-relevant repositories, github was a good start, word-of-mouth with relevant industry partners and universities. if the alternative to your project exists but is that hard to find, id say your niche exists regardless.
Make a post on StackOverflow claiming that no such project exists.
Haha, seriously though, ChatGPT is a solid bet. Lots of Googling. Maybe try https://grep.app/ if you have some very domain specific words to try.
One of the basic rules is that “you can’t prove a negative”. You can only prove it by it contradicting something that has proof, which isn’t gonna work for something like this. As a plain example: you can’t prove you were not at McDonald’s at 8 o’clock last night, but if there’s video of you being somewhere else at that time it proves it only because it would require you to be in two places at once.
So the best you’ll probably do is promising really hard that you did your best to look for it? The problem is that it may well exist, but hasn’t gotten any traction and might be a 1 person thing in some repo somewhere, undocumented and badly searchable with a bad project name.
go on every related discussion platform and claim it doesn’t exist.
