About this document

This report contains the user manual of the WHY Toolkit libraries as well as a set of practical examples of its use with an explanation of the results.

The WHY project aims at developing a toolkit which provides more detailed residential consumption and generation profiles for both heat and electricity - elevating the state of the art beyond basic standardised load profiles. An important aspect of the WHY Toolkit is the consideration of decisions of the inhabitants of the households/houses due to external interventions. The WHY Toolkit uses technical information of the building, behavioural data of the inhabitants and intervention scenarios to create load profiles for electrical and thermal consumption and water usage. 

This report is the description of the WHY-Toolkit and how it is anchored in the WHY architecture, providing information on the interfaces with the other components within the architecture. The different components of the WHY Toolkit are described  and the source code as well as the documentation are referenced. 

The WHY Toolkit consists of 3 main components:

• The Load Profile Generator, which is responsible for simulating the consumption behaviour of the inhabitants and creating electrical load profiles of non-shiftable as well as unoptimised shiftable loads  and generation and the water usage. 
• The Household Infrastructure Simulator (HiSim) which is a modular simulation model for houses/households considering the thermal demands as well as thermal generation and a control algorithm capable of shifting electrical loads. The Household Infrastructure Simulator creates the total load profiles for electrical and thermal demand.
• The Building Sizer, which can be used optionally and is a support tool to optimise the investment decision of the inhabitants resulting from an external intervention.