Abstract
Building energy simulation (BES) has been widely adopted for the investigation of building environmental and energy performance for different design and retrofit alternatives. Data-driven analytics is vital for interpreting and analyzing BES results to reveal trends and provide useful insights. However, seamless integration between BES and data-driven analytics current does not exist. This paper presents eplusr, an R package for conducting data-driven analytics with EnergyPlus. The R package is cross-platform and distributed using CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network). With a data-centric design philosophy, the proposed framework focuses on better and more seamless integration between BES and data-driven analytics. It provides structured inputs/outputs format that can be easily piped into data analytics workflows. The framework also provides an infrastructure to bring portable and reusable computational environment for building energy modeling to facilitate reproducibility research.
