Preparing to relaunch OSeMOSYS for the next decade of open-source energy system modelling

During the Summer School on Modelling Tools for Sustainable Development - OpTIMUS , held at ICTP , Trieste in June 2019, the annual OSeMOSYS Steering Committee meeting was held in which a number of important topics were discussed by a group which represents the varied interests of the OSeMOSYS community. In the years since OSeMOSYS was formally released in 2011, the model has seen a large increase in popularity. Initially, one implementation written in the free and open-source GNU MathProg was available, and through the enthusiastic work of the community has grown to include GAMS, Pyomo and PuLP implementations. One disadvantage of the popularity of OSeMOSYS has been that as a beginner, it is difficult to know what the differences are between the implementations and where to start! To address this, the Steering Committee has decided upon a plan of action to help restructure the OSeMOSYS open-source project so that it better reflects the work and needs of the community. In short, OSeMOSYS is now established as an organisation on GitHub , the popular source code sharing site. The main OSeMOSYS repository  will facilitate the comparison of different implementations of OSeMOSYS and host documentation including the algebraic formulation. New and existing implementations can then be hosted separately by the developers. This work is still at an early stage, but the progress can be followed at github.com/OSeMOSYS/OSeMOSYS . In addition, the process of contributing to the OSeMOSYS code base and formulation will be made much clearer so as to encourage more engagement with and contributions from the wider OSeMOSYS community. Assistant Professor Will Usher  (KTH), Dr. Abhishek Shivakumar  (KTH/UNDESA) and Dr. Taco Niet  (SFU) will help guide the OSeMOSYS community through this period of exciting change.