SimElec

SimElec is a Java model for simulating domestic electricity consumption at one-minute intervals.

It was originally developed at Loughborough University by Ian Richardson and Murray Thomson and was written in Excel using VBA. A Perl version has also been created by Gergely Acs.

This version is maintained by James Keirstead at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London.

System requirements

To use SimElec, you must have a Java runtime environment installed, version 7 update 6 or later.

To generate the R plots, you must have R installed with the Rscript command available from the command line. The ggplot2, scales, and plyr packages must be installed as well.

Use

SimElec can be run as either a standalone Java application with a user interface, or as a code library without the interface.

User interface

To use the GUI version, unzip the zip file on your local hard drive and double-click SimElec-${project.version}-jfx.jar to launch the application.

The user interface allows you to:

• select the number of residents in the household, the month of the year to simulate, and whether to simulate a weekday or weekend.

• specify an output directory. The model results (.csv files for each model and if requested a summary plot) will be placed here.

• select which models to run. SimElec currently supports simulation of appliance and lighting loads. For each model, you can also choose whether to report only the total demands or the disaggregated load profiles by appliance and bulb type.

• calculate a grand total summing the demands from the appliance and lighting models. These are placed in a totals.csv output file.

• make a summary plot of the results using R. This will show the demand profile over the course of the day with background shading to represent household occupancy levels.

Code library

The two main points of entry into the code are SimElec.java which is the main application and SimElecUI.java which launches the user interface. A simulation can therefore be run without the user interface using code similar to:

// Build the model
int month = 7;
int nResidents = 5;
boolean weekend = false;
String outdir = "output";
SimElec simelec = new SimElec(month, nResidents, weekend, outdir)

// Set some options
simelec.setCalculateGrandTotals(true);
simelec.setMakeRPlots(false);

// Run the model
simelec.run();

Further information

More details can be found at the SimElec homepage. The team at Loughborough University have also published a number of academic articles describing the model:

• Richardson, I., Thomson, M., & Infield, D. (2008). A high-resolution domestic building occupancy model for energy demand simulations. Energy and Buildings, 40(8), 1560-1566. doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2008.02.006

• Richardson, I., Thomson, M., Infield, D., & Delahunty, A. (2009). Domestic lighting: A high-resolution energy demand model. Energy and Buildings, 41(7), 781-789. doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2009.02.010

• Richardson, I., Thomson, M., Infield, D., & Clifford, C. (2010). Domestic electricity use: A high-resolution energy demand model. Energy and Buildings, 42(10), 1878-1887. doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2010.05.023

The code is licensed under GPL3.

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