Installation and setup

Following you find guidelines for the installation process for various operating systems. oemof.solph is a Python package, thus it requires you to have Python 3 installed. On top of that, you need a solver to use oemof.solph.

There are several solvers that can work with oemof.solph, both open source and commercial. Two open source solvers are widely used (HiGHS, CBC and GLPK), but oemof.solph suggests CBC (Coin-or branch and cut). It may be useful to compare results of different solvers to see which performs best. Other commercial solvers, like Gurobi or Cplex, are also options. Have a look at the pyomo docs to learn about which solvers are supported.

Using conda (all OS)

You can download a lightweight and open source variant of conda: “miniforge3”.

1. Download latest miniforge3 for Python 3.x (64 or 32 bit).

2. Install miniforge3

3. Open “miniforge prompt” to manage your virtual environments. You can create a new environment and acivate it by

   conda create -n oemof-solph-env python=3.11
   

   conda activate oemof-solph-env
   

4. Install a solver, e.g. CBC

   conda install -c conda-forge coincbc
   

5. Only AFTER you have installed the solver via conda, use pip to install oemof.solph:

   pip install oemof.solph
   

Linux

Install oemof.solph

With python3 installed, we recommend installing oemof.solph within a virtual Python environment and not into the base, system-wide Python installation. On Linux you can use virtualenv to do so.

1. Open terminal to create and activate a virtual environment by typing:

   python -m venv /path/to/desired/oemof-solph-env
   source /path/to/desired/oemof-solph-env/bin/activate
   

2. In terminal type:

   pip install oemof.solph
   

Install a solver

To install the solvers have a look at the package repository of your Linux distribution or search for precompiled packages. GLPK and CBC ares available at Debian, Feodora, Ubuntu and others.

Windows (solver only)

We recommend using conda for the python installation, with which you can also install a solver. If you want to install the solver externally (not via conda), you can follow these steps:

1. Download CBC or GLPK (64/32 bit)

2. Unpack CBC/GLPK to any folder (e.g. C:/Users/Somebody/my_programs)

3. Add the path of the executable files of both solvers to the PATH variable (can be done per user without administrator privileges).

4. Restart Windows

OSX (solver only)

We recommend using conda for the python installation, with which you can also install a solver. If you want to install the solver externally (not via conda), you can follow these steps:

• CBC-solver: https://github.com/coin-or/Cbc

• GLPK-solver: http://arnab-deka.com/posts/2010/02/installing-glpk-on-a-mac/

If you install the CBC solver via brew (highly recommended), it should work without additional configuration.

Developer version

If you would like to get access to not yet released features or features under development you can install the developer version. The steps are similar to the steps here, but INSTEAD of installing oemof.solph using the standard way, follow the instructions on this page.

Installation test

Test the installation and the installed solver by running the installation test in your virtual environment:

oemof_installation_test

If the installation was successful, you will receive something like this:

*********
Solver installed with oemof:
glpk: working
cplex: not working
cbc: working
gurobi: not working
*********
oemof.solph successfully installed.

as an output.