EnergyPlus Integration Into Co-Simulation Environment to Improve Home Energy Saving Through Cyber-Physical Systems Development

This paper presents a co-simulation platform which combines a building simulation tool with a Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) approach. Residential buildings have a great potential of energy reduction by controlling home equipment based on usage information. A CPS can eliminate unnecessary energy usage on a small, local scale by autonomously optimizing equipment activity, based on sensor measurements from the home. It can also allow peak shaving from the grid if a collection of homes are connected. However, lack of verification tools limits effective development of CPS products. The present work integrates EnergyPlus, which is a widely adopted building simulation tool, into an open-source development environment for CPS released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The NIST environment utilizes the IEEE High Level Architecture (HLA) standard for data exchange and logical timing control to integrate a suite of simulators into a common platform. A simple CPS model, which controls local HVAC temperature set-point based on environmental conditions, was tested with the developed co-simulation platform. The proposed platform can be expanded to integrate various simulation tools and various home simulations, thereby allowing for co-simulation of more intricate building energy systems.