EnHub

This platform integrates the strengths of pre-existing housing stock energy models, notably their delineation of stock composition and attribution, albeit in a simplified form. It incorporates functionalities to quantify uncertainties and assess the potential consequences of policies and strategies aimed at decarbonising the UK housing stock.

Features

• Development of an open-access modular platform

• Generation of explicit volumetric archetypes based on survey data

• Energy peformance evaluation using dynamic simulation (i.e. of envelope properties and household variables)

• Standardisation of data and modelling algorithms

• Housing stock evaluation

• Analysis of drivers of decision-making regarding energy use intensity

• Analysis of strategies at scale

• Sensitivity analysis and multi-layered parametrisation

• Decoupled processes, enabling the ability to make use of High Performance Computing facilities.

System requirements

Installation

You can install the development version of EnHub from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("EnHub-UK/enhub", build_vignettes = TRUE)

It may require a token. Define that token in .Renviron, which contains environment variables to be set in R sessions. Once defined—under an arbitrary name (eg. GITHUBTOKEN), the token needs to appear when calling Sys.getenv().

# To display all the environment variables
Sys.getenv()

# To display only the token value
Sys.getenv(c("GITHUBTOKEN"))

Use the argument auth_token in the installation command:

devtools::install_github(
  "EnHub-UK/enhub", 
  build_vignettes = TRUE, 
  auth_token = Sys.getenv("GITHUBTOKEN"))

Caveats

Due to the licenses of the the main data sources: EHS and UK-TUS, the related datasets are currently excluded from the R-project. These include: s_ehs_2011_ext, s_ehs_2011_hhd, s_ehs_2011_rom, s_ehs_ml, s_tus and s_tus_ehs, which are required as lists for the package to work.

The datasets may available upon request to the authors of the package.

The instructions to generate these files, using the companion repositories, are available in the vignettes.

Setup

Load the library

library(enhub)

Usage

See the vignettes in the documentation

References and further reading

▪️ G. Sousa, B.M. Jones, P.A. Mirzaei, D. Robinson, Platform for dynamic national housing stock simulation to evaluate decarbonisation scenarios. In Building Simulation 2017.

▪️ G. Sousa, B.M. Jones, P.A. Mirzaei, D. Robinson, An open-source simulation platform to support the formulation of housing stock decarbonisation strategies, Energy and Buildings (2018) 459-477. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2018.05.015

▪️ G. Sousa, D. Robinson, Enhanced EnHub: dynamic simulation of housing stock energy systems, Journal of Building Performance Simulation (2020) - 13(5), 516–531. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/19401493.2020.1788641.

License

EnHub-UK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You can also read the full terms in LICENSE.md

Authors

G Sousa – github-author