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Documentation

Things that I was going to say in my teesis:

The program is operated via the terminal or command prompt, rather than via a graphical user interface (GUI). This was chosen so that batches of large simulations could easily be deployed on single machines or across computer clusters, and for the simplicity and flexibility offered by configuration files.

The program is controlled by user generated configuration files, which consist of a set of instructions and options written as plain text in eXtensible Markup Language (XML) format. Configuration files are used to control every aspect of the simulation:

• The energy system that is being studied: what devices are included, and what operating strategy should be used;
• The houses that are being studied: links to individual files, or directories of energy demand profiles;
• The details of each device in the system: the output capacity, efficiency, lifetime, and other dynamic features;
• Other input assumptions: scaling factors for the demand, economic information such as fuel prices, and what format to use for output results.

Most aspects of the simulation have pre-defined default values, which can then be overridden by the configuration file. For example, the default condensing gas boiler has 24kW output capacity, and is 86% efficient, with a 15 year lifetime. An overview of what parameters can be specified for each type of device is given in the following section (which doesn't exist here =P).

Overview of logging:

• Result files are generated in plain-text CSV format, for import into Excel
• Logging can be done per timestep, per house, per monte-carlo run, per optimisation run, or per scenario – for flexibility.
• There are six default formats (sets of recorded information) that are hard-coded into the program - these can be modified or extended by adding additional functions to the Logger class. The things available are:
  • Power and energy flow throughout the system;
  • Device efficiencies, ages, capacities;
  • Fuel costs and capital costs.

A set of example configuration files are provided with the program, which provide sample calculations for a traditional setup (condensing boiler, and electricity from the grid) and various configurations involving a fuel cell. These can then be tailored by the user to their specific calculation. The program can then be run from the Microsoft Windows command prompt with a simple command such as fc++ -c "config.xml"