Energy Modelling workshop and 5th Pyomofest

Guest blog: Magnus Korpås, NTNU

Pyomofest

From October 3^rd -5^th 2017, we arranged the 5^th workshop on the open-source optimization modeling language Pyomo (the so-called Pyomofest) followed by a full-day workshop on energy systems modelling and optimization.

• This blog is based on the work of FME CINELDI. Their 1^stAnnual report is out now and can be found here

The workshop was a result of a collaboration between NTNU, CINELDI and our international research partners Sandia National Labs and UC Davis.

The purpose of the workshop was three-fold:

• To provide an opportunity for Pyomo developers and users within energy systems and grid modelling to share their collective experiences.
• To give PhD students, researchers and analysts an excellent opportunity to present their research to other experts on mathematical modelling and optimization of energy systems
• To give all attendees an inspiring meeting place to discuss possibilities for further modelling development and research collaboration.

Pyomo is a Python-based open-source software package. It supports a diverse set of optimization capabilities for formulating, solving, and analyzing general optimization models, and has gained increasing interest and use the last years. This was evident from the interest for the workshop – we ended up with more than 50 participants, around twice of what we initially expected.

The participants came from universities, research institutes, public bodies and private sector. Most were from Norway, but we also had participants from universities in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany and Austria.

The workshop kicked off with a short tutorial on Pyomo modelling. It was followed by presentations and discussions on how to use Pyomo to model and optimize energy systems in general, and smart grids systems in particular. On the last day, 13 of the participants presented their own model-based research from PhD projects and research projects at NTNU, SINTEF, UC Davis, Sandia, Univ. of Michigan, Fraunhofer, and Imperial College.