EplusLauncher: An API to Perform Complex EnergyPlus Simulations in MATLAB® and C#

Abstract

There is a growing concern about how to mitigate climate change, in which the production and use of energy has a great impact as one of the largest sources of global greenhouse gases (GHG). Buildings are responsible for a large percentage of these emissions. Therefore, there has been an increase in research in this area, in order to reduce their consumption and increase their efficiency. One of the major simulation programs used in optimization research is EnergyPlus. The purpose of this software is the complete energy simulation of a building, although it lacks tools to analyze its results and, above all, to manage and edit its simulations. For this reason, we developed an application programming interface (API) that serves to merge two areas which are highly demanded by researchers: energy building simulation (using EnergyPlus) and tools for the management and design of research experiments (in this case, MATLAB®). The developed API allows the user to perform complex simulations using EnergyPlus in a simple way, as it allows the editing of each simulation and the analysis of the simulation results through MATLAB®. In addition, it enables the user to simultaneously run multiple simulations, using either all computer core processors or a selection of them (i.e., allowing parallel computing), reducing the simulation time. The API was developed in the C# language, such that it can be used with any software that can import . N E T libraries.

A New Tool for Building Energy Optimization: First Round of Successful Dynamic Model Simulations

“…Focusing on coding tools, the interest in developing EnergyPlus based tools to perform optimizations was underlined in recent publications. E.g., in [12] a new application (EplusLauncher API) was described that is able to run EnergyPlus simulations and to potentially support some input changes and facilitate output analyses. Nevertheless, controlled parameters are limited to simulation running periods and temperature setpoints for all thermal zones because of the MATLAB ® code.…”