Reinforcement Learning Workflow with EnergyPlus

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RL with Energyplus is a nice topic :) have also worked on this accordingly.
In my case i'm doing a PhD where i built a framework for doing exactly that on multiple buildings, you can contact me if you need further information (is not yet disclosed for public).
And then apply RL, and so to answer your question of linking E+ with Python:

• do your own code to interact with model classes
• use Eppy python library or use other libraries you find out there or go to first item and do one yourself

According to my experience it really Eppy was not able to automate very well because is not fully developed and it not supports very well conda environments, so have done it with own scripts.
Having known this is also important notice that it helped some users who like you wanted to interact with code.
You can give a try for any of these and check how it works for you.
Added contacts for interested in Reinforcement Learning and multiple buildings energy simulation (UBEMs):
Research Team: http://in3.dem.ist.utl.pt/team/member...
URL: luxmagna.org
Email: francisco.pires.costa at tecnico.ulisboa.pt
So Cheers.

UPDATE: I will site this thread in my PhD dissertation (which is going to be delivered this week) where a new UBEM paradigm and respective Implementation will be offered, which will enable users to integrate data science workflows like reinforcement learning and so on with current UBEM implementations. Will post here a link to the public version. This is a begin of a very interesting possibility to model cities, for anyone interested do contact me. Cheers.

Hi,

Sorry for late answer as I did not see this before until now. We have developed a development platform using

(DesignBuilder + Energyplus) + BCVTB + Python/Keras

This way we can perform RL/ML on EnergyPlus models. I would be very happy to let other people use the platform and open source the entire work on Github or similar! Please send me an email if you want to get involved!

Johan

johan@zyax.se

For my own research, I have created a Python framework using the E+ EMS Python API to help manage creating a RL environemnt with a running E+ simulation. My code and its documentation can be found in my GitHub repo here https://github.com/mechyai/RL-EmsPy.

This is still a work in progress, but EmsPy, BcaEnv, and MdpManager classes of my Repo are working well and I am running PyTorch Deep RL models.

I can site 2 projects that aim at simplifying setup of a reinforcement learning training environment using EnergyPlus. They avoid the need to use a co-simulation tool (ie BCVTB) and integrate with recent RL training framework.

• IBM RL Testbed for EnergyPlus. It uses a patched version of EnergyPlus and custom EMS operators
• RLlib EnergyPlus. It integrates with EnergyPlus python API. Probably the simplest.

disclaimer: I'm maintainer on the first, author of the second.