Python: using OpenStudio Bindings, EnergyPlus API, and matplotlib

Written By Julien Marrec of EffiBEM, circa 2021-01-05.

Purpose

This notebook aims to demonstrate the use of:

• The OpenStudio Python Bindings.

  • This is used to efficiently create and customize a model to be simulated

  • Note: Until a version > 3.1.0 (eg 3.1.1 or 3.2.0) is out on pypi, I recommend using the testpypi version where I made usability adjustments. You can do pip install -i https://test.pypi.org/simple/ openstudio for that one.

• The EnergyPlus Python API, and how to use callbacks to retrieve data

• Updating a live matplotlib plot during E+ simulation via the EnergyPlus Python API callback.

Several options and examples are shown below. I strongly recommend you encapsulate your data inside a class (see section 3.4) instead of relying on python global data, but it does bring a sligthly higher complexity level so for simple stuff you can ommit that and use 3.1 to 3.3 instead (which are also used as an entry point to demonstrate the API)

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Resources:

• OpenStudio SDK documentation: https://openstudio-sdk-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html
• EnergyPlus Python API documentation: https://energyplus.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api.html

Demo