Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) has been developing a building energy modeling tool called DIMOSIM for over 10 years. This simulation tool is capable of modeling thermal energy demand, energy systems, occupant behavior associated with electrical appliance loads, thermal and electrical grids connecting buildings. There is also smart grid functionality related to photovoltaic electrical generation and electrical storage management. Currently this tool can be used by project partners through a basic web API but this interface is not very user friendly. This year, the DIMOSIM team has been developing a plugin in QGis to offer a user friendly, geographical interface to improve the user experience and even allow non-technical users to access and use DIMOSIM.
Current functionality of the interface includes building a new project, modifying global or building specific simulation parameters, selecting system types, selecting simulation type, drawing a thermal grid connecting buildings, simulating the thermal energy demand or electrical load of the project. The most challenging part of using the current web API for users is understanding the input parameter files that have a specific format for DIMOSIM. The current QGis plugin uses template files and dialog boxes to explain the meaning of each parameter. There is also the possibility to load building geometry and some building parameters from the open API of the National Building Data Base (BDNB) also produced by CSTB. The user can then manually adjust parameters or use a default value option to fill in missing values.
A thermal network can also be added including district heating or cooling systems. This type of simulation with the current DIMOSIM API is a bit challenging to understand by users. With the QGis interface, some parameters are automatically adjusted to ensure the correct configuration of multiple input files. An initial grid geometry is very easy to draw in QGis which is then optimized by DIMOSIM connecting all applicable buildings to the grid. The user can once again modify parameters and systems configurations before completing the simulation.
Future developments include improving user selection of desired results and results viewing. Currently typical results are provided to the user via a csv file. A selected result of interest is aggregated and loaded as a layer to visualize the building geometries and their aggregated results value. Ideally, a more detailed investigation of the results should be possible allowing for multiple aggregated results to be visualized and a choice of aggregation type for each results type. Exploring options in DataPlotly to plot timeseries graphs for some results would be ideal.