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Welcome to the OCHRE™ Gym Docs

OCHRE™ (pronounced "Oh-ker") Gym is a Gymnasium environment based on the purely Python-based OCHRE™ residential energy building simulator. OCHRE™ is a high-fidelity, high-resolution residential building model developed by NREL with behind-the-meter DERs and flexible load models that integrates with controllers and distribution models in building-to-grid co-simulation platforms. It has been benchmarked against EnergyPlus to quantify the tradeoff between fidelity and speed. Read more about OCHRE™ here.

OCHRE™ Gym features:

  • No EnergyPlus; each Dwelling consists of multiple RC circuits implemented in pure Python
  • Works with any building that OCHRE™ supports: get building models from NREL End-Use Load Profiles, ResStock, BEopt, etc.
  • Flexible control of building equipment (HVAC, Water Heater)--support coming for DERs (PV, Battery, EV)
  • Customizable observation space with equipment-level, building-level, and building metadata
  • Simple reward: minimize cost of energy use while maintaining comfort
  • 3 different demand response (DR) cost functions: Real-Time Pricing (RTP), Time-of-Use (TOU), and Power Constraints (PC)

Installation

Install from PyPI pip install ochre_gym.

Or,

Install in editable mode with pip install -e . from the root of this repo.

  1. Using conda or venv, create an environment with python >= 3.9: conda create -n ochre_gym python=3.9.
  2. Clone this repo: git clone git@github.com/NREL/ochre_gym.git
  3. cd ochre_gym
  4. pip install -e .

Test your installation with unittest by running python3 -m unittest from the root of this repo.

Getting Started