COBS: COmprehensive Building Simulator (Early access v0.1)

COBS is an open-source, modular co-simulation platform for developing and comparing building control algorithms. It integrates various simulators and agent models with EnergyPlus and supports fine-grained and occupant-centric control of building subsystems. COBS provides the ability to access the state after each simulation step in EnergyPlus and to use its value to determine the control action for the next time step(s). The interface is designed similar to OpenAI Gym so that the environments written for Gym can be easily used with the simulator.

COBS is licensed under MIT.

This platform is developed by Tianyu Zhang (tzhang6@ualberta.ca). We acknowledge the contribution of Gaby Baasch gaby.baasch@gmail.com, who wrote several control agents and contributed code to this platform.

Contributing

We welcome contributions in different forms, from bug reports to pull requests. We encourage the community to use, improve, and extend COBS by adding new occupancy and building models and sharing the implementation of control algorithms. For major changes, please open an issue to discuss how you would like to change the platform.

Documentation

Documentation is available at https://cobs-platform.github.io

Dependencies

This platform requires EnergyPlus v9.3.0 and is not capatible with other version for now. Visit this page for the full list of dependencies.

Acknowledgement

• Building models (./cobs/data/buildings/*): The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)
• Weather data (./cobs/data/weathers/*): The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)

Cite COBS

Tianyu Zhang and Omid Ardakanian. 2020. COBS: COmprehensive Building Simulator, In Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys '20). ACM, 314-315.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3408308.3431119,
author = {Zhang, Tianyu and Ardakanian, Omid},
title = {COBS: COmprehensive Building Simulator},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450380614},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3408308.3431119},
doi = {10.1145/3408308.3431119},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation},
pages = {314--315},
location = {Virtual Event, Japan},
series = {BuildSys ’20}
}

Changelog

• 2022/06/05
  • Fixed eppy usage.
  • Fixed window blinds adding function.
  • Added support for reading meters.
  • Added support for manually assign offices to occupants.