archetypal: A Python package for collecting, simulating, converting and analyzing building archetypes

The field of Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM), which assesses the energy performance
of buildings in cities relies on advanced physical models known as building energy models
that are representative of the building stock. These building archetypes are often
developed in specific modelling platforms such as EnergyPlus or TRNSYS, two leading
simulation engines in the field of building energy modeling. EnergyPlus is an open source
simulation engine developed by the US Department of Energy. TRNSYS is a well established
and specialized simulation platform used to simulate the behavior of transient systems.
The Urban Modeling Interface (UMI), developed by the MIT Sustainable Design Lab, leverages
EnergyPlus to enable building energy modeling at the urban scale. The three tools offer
many advantages in their respective fields, but all suffer from the same flaw: creating
building archetypes for any platform is a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone process.
`archetypal` is a Python package that helps handling collections of such archetypes and to
enable the interoperability between these energy simulation platforms to accelerate the
creation of reliable urban building energy models. This package offers three major
capabilities for researchers and practitioners:

1. Run, modify and analyze collections of EnergyPlus models in a persistent environment;
2. Convert EnergyPlus models to UMI;
3. Edit UMI Template Files in a scripting environment;
4. Convert EnergyPlus models to TRNSYS TrnBuild Models.