Smart Residential Community Simulator for Developing and Benchmarking Energy Management Systems

Home Energy Management Systems (HEMS) are critical for enabling demand response and ensuring resilience in both on-grid and off-grid settings. However, most existing simulators lack flexibility, being tailored to fixed DER configurations and fixed number of houses. To address this, we present a scalable Gymnasium-compatible simulator that supports any number of homes with heterogeneous DERs—including PV, battery, both, or none—and models air-conditioning and prioritized circuit-level loads. The simulator integrates NSRDB weather and Pecan Street load datasets, includes three default controllers, and offers built-in performance metrics and visualization tools. We demonstrate its flexibility through simulations on both single homes and a four-house community, highlighting its ability to benchmark control strategies across varying configurations.