@Aaron Boranian I read your comment how to start simulation at custom hour and understood/agreed that we "can't start an EnergyPlus simulation at a custom hour, it will always start at the beginning of the first day in the run period."

However, I was wondering if you could do me a favor and let me know with any potential solution to "define start time in my Energyplus model". In particular, I already wrote a (MATLAB) code to run my idf through it. In this code, I have a for-loop and I need to run my idf file starting from h to h+24 (h=1:24). In other words, I need to have results generated per hour, which entitles defining start time in the idf file.

P.S. I'm running/optimizing my model only for one day (MPC Application, runperiod= 1 day).

I truly appreciate all your continued support.