Installation

Recommended installation

MESMO has not yet been deployed to Python pip / conda package indexes, but can be installed in a local development environment as follows:

1. Install conda-based Python distribution¹ such as Anaconda or Miniconda or Miniforge.

2. Clone or download the repository. Ensure that the cobmo submodule directory is loaded as well.

3. In conda-enabled shell (e.g. Anaconda Prompt), run:

   • cd path_to_mesmo_repository

   • conda create -n mesmo -c conda-forge python=3.10 contextily cvxpy numpy pandas scipy

   • conda activate mesmo

   • python development_setup.py

   • On Intel CPUs²: conda install -c conda-forge "libblas=*=*mkl"

MESMO ships with HiGHS as default optimization solver³, but also supports Gurobi and any CVXPY-supported solvers.

Notes

¹ The installation via conda is recommended, because it sets up a dedicated Python environment and supports the performant Intel MKL math library on Intel CPUs for numpy / scipy. It also allows installing the contextily package on Windows, which is required for some geographical plots. The direct installation via pip in a non-conda environment is also possible, but is currently not tested.

² On Intel CPUs, using the Intel MKL math library enables better performance in numpy / scipy over the default OpenBLAS library. With conda-forge, these libraries can be configured via conda install command.

³ HiGHS is currently MESMO’s default optimization solver and the HiGHS binaries are automatically fetched during MESMO setup. Other solvers can be selected via MESMO configuration. For better performance, MESMO implements direct solver interfaces to HiGHS and Gurobi. Other solvers are indirectly supported via CVXPY. CVXPY comes bundled with several open-source solvers and supports additional solvers via manual installation (see “Install with … support” sections in CVPXY installation guide). Note that interfacing solvers via CVXPY currently has performance limitations for large-scale scenarios.

Alternative installation

If you are running into errors when installing or running MESMO, this may be due to incompatibility with new versions of package dependencies, which have yet to be discovered and fixed. As a workaround, try installing MESMO via the provided environment-windows-latest.yml / environment-macos-latest.yml / environment-ubuntu-latest.yml, which represent the latest Python environment in which MESMO was tested and is expected to work for the respective OS.

Important

Please create an issue on Github if you run into problems with the recommended installation procedure.

1. Install conda-based Python distribution such as Anaconda or Miniconda or Miniforge.

2. Clone or download repository. Ensure that the cobmo submodule directory is loaded as well.

3. In conda-enabled shell (e.g. Anaconda Prompt), run:

   • cd path_to_mesmo_repository

   • On Windows: conda env create -f environment-windows-latest.yml

   • On macOS: conda env create -f environment-macos-latest.yml

   • On Ubuntu: conda env create -f environment-ubuntu-latest.yml

   • conda activate mesmo

   • python development_setup.py