I recently submitted a paper which said that an integrated model of domestic energy consumption is desperately needed. What’s more, I said that it didn’t look as though anyone else was really working on something like this. Turns out I was only partly right – people are working on integrated models, they’re just not integrating them with each other.
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I read an interesting article yesterday by Yao et al (in Energy and Buildings) about how to create domestic load profiles. This paper is properly the most direct precursor to what I’m trying to do with my modelling. The main behavioural response to PV that I will be examining is a temporal shift and so if I’m going to simulate that change I need to be able to simulate consumption on a comparable time scale. Anyway the paper was interesting but left me wondering:
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Follow-up interviews have been conducted with those who were willing to be contacted. If you have not been contacted yet but feel you have something to add to the research, please get in touch using the contact information on the side of this page.
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Does anyone have any advice on version numbers? Is there a rule of thumb to figure out what constitutes a 0.x release? Do others not even bothering numbering their model versions?
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…don’t even think about coding before you’ve got the program designed.
Ha – easier said than done! As anyone who’s ever been bitten by the programming bug would tell you, it’s much more fun to just start typing. You want to see if it works. You’ll try out little bits and pieces, saying “I’ll just sketch it out”, “let’s make sure I can get these functions to talking to each other” and so on. Before you know it, you’ve got this big unwieldly mess of code and you can’t remember what it was supposed to do.
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Before I get into all the nitty-gritty of what I’m working on, I thought I’d give a quick run down of my setup.
I’ve got a bit of programming experience but not so much that I would want to use C or any of its variants so all the coding is done in Java 1.5 (or 5.0 – whatever the right one is). I’m using Eclipse 3 M4 as an IDE (works great except for JavaDoc support) with the RePast agent-based modelling framework. R is used for statistical analysis.
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