eplusr: A framework for integrating building energy simulation and data-driven analytics

Abstract

Building energy simulation (BES) has been widely adopted for the investigation of building environmental and energy performance for different design and retrofit alternatives. Data-driven analytics is vital for interpreting and analyzing BES results to reveal trends and provide useful insights. However, seamless integration between BES and data-driven analytics current does not exist. This paper presents eplusr, an R package for conducting data-driven analytics with EnergyPlus. The R package is cross-platform and distributed using CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network). With a data-centric design philosophy, the proposed framework focuses on better and more seamless integration between BES and data-driven analytics. It provides structured inputs/outputs format that can be easily piped into data analytics workflows. The R package also provides an infrastructure to bring portable and reusable computational environment for building energy modeling to facilitate reproducibility research.