Smart Residential Load Simulator (SRLS)

License agreement

This program is provided without charge for testing purposes only. The program or any of its parts may not be used for any commercial applications.

The authors would appreciate any comments and suggestions on how to improve the program. Any reports of problems should be directed to the authors, who reserve their right to modify the program at any time without previous notification.

Disclaimer: The authors do not guarantee the accuracy of the results obtained with this program, nor its performance. 

Brief program description

The SRLS is a tool developed under the auspices of The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) that facilitates the study of energy management systems in smart grids based on Matlab-Simulink-GUIDE toolboxes. This provides a complete set of user-friendly graphical interfaces to properly model and study smart:

  • Thermostats
  • Air conditioners
  • Furnaces
  • Water heaters
  • Refrigerators
  • Stoves
  • Dish washers
  • Cloth washers
  • Dryers
  • Lights
  • Pool pumps
As well as wind and solar sources of power generation, and a battery energy storage system, in residential houses. The impact of different variables such as ambient temperature, solar irradiance, and household activity levels that considerably contribute to energy consumption are also considered. The simulator allows to model the way appliances consume power and helps to understand how these contribute to peak demand providing individual and total energy consumption and costs, allowing as well to assess the value and impact of generated power by residential power sources. This freeware platform can be a useful tool for researchers and educators to validate and demonstrate models for residential energy management and optimization, and can also be used by residential customers to model and understand energy consumption profiles in households.

To access the program, unzip the following file: SRLS version 2.4.

Version 2.4: Solves issue in solar irradiance calculations; enables thermostat operation in schedule mode; considers a fixed pre-defined ground temperature for the house thermal model; allows uploading ambient conditions data from workspace.

Version 2.0: This version includes more detailed thermal models of the household, solar irradiance calculations, allows saving the simulation results data, and fixes some bugs on the furnace operation.

Detailed description of the smart residential load simulator (PDF).

Help and tutorials

The program has been updated to run with Matlab-Simulink R2019 or higher; please note that older versions of Matlab-Simulink may yield warning/fatal errors, and that the current program interface may be affected by the user’s screen configuration. To run the SRLS, follow these instructions:

  1. Download the simulator from the link above. 
  2. Unzip the files in the directory you will be working on.
  3. Open Matlab and make the directory where you saved the SRLS folder your current Matlab’s directory.
  4. Type Smart_Residential_Load_Simulator on the Matlab's command window. That runs a Matlab script with the same name, which loads the SRLS Graphical User Interface (GUI), and opens a Simulink file containing the simulator models.
  5. Use the SRLS interface to set the model parameters.
  6. Click on "Run" to start the simulation. It will take a few seconds for the simulation to be completed, depending on your machine.
  7. Click on "Plots" to display the results. This launches a new window with a variety of plots where you can select the variables you wish to graph.

To learn how the program works, two demos are provided with the simulator. To display the demo data, click on the Case 1 or Case 2 buttons in the SRLS main window, and then click on Continue to load the data in the model. Then run the simulation and plot the results following steps 6 and 7.

If you have any problems, we might be able to help you depending on availability and time constraints. Email Ivan Calero describing your problems and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.