Good morning OpenMod colleagues,
I am writing to share some updates about RAMP, an open-source energy demand modelling software that has been around since early 2019 but that we haven’t really officially promoted here until now. Given the recent co-development results made possible by many OpenMod supporters, it’s about time we did.
RAMP is an open-source software suite for the stochastic simulation of any user-driven energy demand time series based on a few simple inputs. Initially developed by me with the guidance of an early OpenMod supporter, @sylvain, the software aims to provide synthetic data wherever metered data does not exist. For instance, when designing systems for off-grid communities (the original focus of the software) or when looking at future electric-vehicle fleets. You can find more information on the applications on our new website: rampdemand.org.
Since its first publication and release in April 2019, RAMP has been picked up by several institutions, including RLI, ETH Zurich, Eurac, VITO and many others. In June 2022, RLI (via @pierre-francois.duc and @TheGregoryIreland) and VITO (via @mohammad1372), who were further developing the code for their own projects, reached out to us to join forces and co-fund the development of a ‘next-gen’ version of RAMP. Last week, we released the first such next-gen version of RAMP as v0.4.0: more user-friendly and efficient, installable via pip, and more extensively documented; you may check out the development page of the website for all the details. And let me give a big shout-out to all contributors, particularly to @pierre-francois.duc, who was the first to propose a joint development, did most of the heavy lifting and implemented insane features.
A final remark: some of you may be more familiar with the dedicated RAMP-mobility sister repository, accompanied by a publication a few months ago and also designed to provide critically needed electric mobility data for European energy system optimisation models (for instance, it is part of the Euro-Calliope dataset). If you are wondering how RAMP-mobility fits into all of the above, our next step is indeed to reconnect RAMP-mobility to this joint development process. Currently a separate sister code, not involved in recent joint developments, we want to turn RAMP-mobility into an optional plug-and-play application of the base RAMP software, which may benefit from all the developments occurring there. If you are interested in helping, please do reach out!
For any questions, feel free to contact me or reach out to the broader RAMP community via our Gitter chat!
Thanks,
Francesco