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Autotune

Automatic optimization/calibration technology - applied to EnergyPlus building energy models for matching measured data.

Directories:

  • demo - quickest way to see Autotune run (uses 15-minute data)
  • installer - install scripts to setup Autotune web-service
  • frontend - webpage for defining residential or medium office building and starting Autotune
  • backend - Autotune server that listens and processes new jobs
  • service - web service for accepting new job requests
    • example - web service client for calling the web service (with example data files)

Background

Building energy models (EnergyPlus, energy audit tools, etc.) of existing buildings are unreliable unless calibrated so they correlate well with actual energy usage. Calibrating models is costly because it is currently an “art”, requiring significant manual effort by an experienced, skilled professional. Manual tuning is also imperfect, non-repeatable, and non-transferable.

Goals

Deploy a generalized, automated building energy model tuning methodology that enables models to reproduce measured data by selecting best-match input parameters in a systematic, automated, and repeatable fashion. In application, this aims to significantly reduce the costs to develop building energy models, enhance the cost-effectiveness of retrofit projects, and expand the market to smaller buildings. It also improves the state of the art in energy savings measurement and verification (M&V) for performance contracting, fault-detection and diagnostics (FDD), building automation, and related purposes.

Scope

The related research addresses: multi-objective optimization, web services for easy integration with existing business processes, field-deployable systems, sensitivity analysis, quality assurance and control for missing or corrupt data, big data mining, a suite of machine learning algorithms to generate calibration functions, optimal calibration algorithm selection using high performance computing resources, quantified assessments of trade-offs between tuning accuracy and amount of data available, calibration using monthly data (12 points/year), demonstrations using research houses with 15-minute sensor channels (700,000 data points per year), and implementation of a testing methodology for quantifying accuracy of the final calibrated model to the real building. For more information on the research behind Autotune, please see http://bit.ly/autotune_papers.

Quick Demonstrations

Lean Windows Demo

This illustrates the basic Autotune calibration functionality in the quickest way possible and with a minimum amount of user effort. This demonstrates calibration of 303 parameters running only 16 EnergyPlus simulations, so a user shouldn't expect much of an improvement in error for this short demo.

Larger demo on a virtual machine

This larger demo illustrates the full functionality of having Autotune running on a server as a web-service. A virtual machine of the setup is provided for getting up and running fairly quickly.

A fully functioning Ubuntu Linux Virtual Machine has been created with all dependencies to provide a quick demonstration of Autotune. Just VirtualBox and Vagrant are required to download and launch this image.

  • Install VirtualBox and Vagrant
    • Enable Virtualization Technology (VT-x) in BIOS
    • All passwords for this system (including screen timeout) are autotune
  • Configure Vagrant
    • On a command line terminal, in a new directory of your choice, run vagrant init sanyalj/ornl-autotune - this will create a Vagrantfile.
    • Edit the Vagrantfile to add the following snippet within the Vagrant.configure(2) do |config| ... end section:
      # Config username
      config.ssh.username = "autotune"
      
      # start GUI
      config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |v|
        v.gui = true
      end
      
    • vagrant up --provider virtualbox - this will download the VM from Atlas (the new version of VagrantCloud) and then power up the instance with a Linux (Ubuntu) GUI.
      • If loading the image in the window is not responsive, open VirtualBox, right-click the "Autotune_default" image, select settings, and set memory and processor in the green area to optimize for your system's capabilities.

We have observed, on one occassion, that the VM created in VirtualBox after the vagrant progess was marked as a 32-bit version of Ubuntu. This resulted in a blank GUI when running vagrant up. Changing it to 64-bit resolved the problem.

Running on the Virtual Machine

  1. Standalone
    • Double-click Autotune_standalone_demo.sh - this runs the python script using example files
  2. Web Service Client
    • Double-click Autotune_webservice_client.sh - the Autotune web service is loaded at startup, this will run a webservice client that uses the Autotune web service using example files
  3. Website
    • Double-click Autotune_webpage.html - this allows a user to interact with a web interface to define a building, location, measured data, and submit the calibration to the Autotune web service.

Note: Options #2 and #3 will provide you a tracking number. Please use this tracking number in the VirtualBox's browser (which will open to the Autotune homepage) to check the job status and if complete, download the resulting calibrated input files.

Server Installations

These instructions are used to setup a machine so that Autotune can be invoked through the provided website and/or web service.

Windows Server

Requirements:

Linux Server

Linux (Ubuntu example here), PHP 5.x, MySQL, Python 2.7, Python suds, Energyplus 7.0 in default install location

Get prerequisites

  1. sudo apt-get install git
  2. sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ (it will prompt for mysql password)
  3. sudo apt-get install php-soap
  4. sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb
  5. sudo apt-get install python-pip
  6. sudo apt-get install python-numpy
  7. sudo pip install inspyred
  8. Install EnergyPlus, use default locations sudo ./SetEPlusV700036-lin.sh Use the password you obtained for this version of EnergyPlus

Weather Files

  1. Extract additional weather files to WeatherData directory of EnergyPlus
  2. Download WeatherData.tar.gz
  3. tar zxvf WeatherData.tar.gz
  4. sudo mv WeatherData/* /usr/local/EnergyPlus-7-0-0/WeatherData/

MySQL settings

  1. In /etc/mysql/my.cnf
  • max_allowed_packet = 64M
  1. Underneath the [mysqld] section:
  • add lower_case_table_names = 1
  1. Restart MySQL
  • sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart

PHP settings

  1. In php.ini
  2. max_execution_time = 180
  3. max_input_time = 180
  4. post_max_size = 64M
  5. upload_max_filesize = 64M

Setup the installation

  1. Clone/export the git repo
  2. Modify the installer/install-settings.ini to supply appropriate values
  3. Run sudo python install.py

Permission changes

  1. In the location of the autotune on the web-server:
  2. sudo chmod 777 backend
  3. sudo chmod 777 frontend
  4. sudo chmod 777 service
  5. sudo chmod 777 backend/autotune.log

Create MySQL database

  1. mysql -u root -p
  2. create database autotune;
  3. create user 'autotune'@'%' identified by 'password';
  4. grant all on autotune.* to 'autotune'@'%';
  5. mysql -u root -p autotune < backend/autotune.sql

Example Test

  1. To run the example in service/example
  • python pyClient.py
  1. Web frontend:
  • Go to: http://localhost/autotune/frontend/home.html