Effective Dorm Power Simulation Ideas

The idea of creating an effective simulation for power readings for an entire dorm is both interesting and a challenge. When this project was described it was something that I knew that I could become interested in. I began brainstorming ways in which a realistic simulation could be designed.

The obvious way was to create a large array which stored different data points based off of some research. This was is obviously undesirable since it is much less useful for testing. The next easiest way would be to get random variables between a pair of limits. This is actually being used right now for basic testing, but this still isn't a realistic simulation of a dorm's power usage.

The way that we have decided to go with is to store data of a average day for each day of the week, since the energy use can vary greatly depending on the day. Next, we would have a skew value, probably are 10%, which would be used to get a random value between the end points. This way seems to be a way which could produce realistic data which could be used to dependably test other code. After this is implemented, we will be able to tell if my hopes hold true and if we need to make adjustments to the algorithm.