Installation

CESAR-P has currently no executable, so here is the installation guide to install the cesar-p-core library. See Set up simulation on instructions how to use the library.

Quick steps to install cesar-p-core library:

  1. Download and install EnergyPlus Version 9.5.0 https://energyplus.net/downloads (install to default location)

  2. Download and install Python 3.8 from https://www.python.org/downloads/

  3. Create and activate a virtual environment for Python 3.8

    e.g. on windows you can use following commands in your shell to do this

    python -m venv %USERPROFILE%/venv-cesar-p
%USERPROFILE%/venv-cesar-p/Scripts/activate
  4. Install cesar-p-core library
    pip install cesar-p

You have now a virtual environment set up in which you can use cesar-p library from your python script. To get you started check out the examples on https://github.com/hues-platform/cesar-p-usage-examples

Following are some more detaild installation instructions for customized setup.

In case you need to extend or modify the library itself, check out the installation guide for library development under (Development Installation).

1. EnergyPlus

CESAR-P simulates the building energy demand with EnergyPlus. Currently supported versions are 8.5, 8.7, 8.8, 8.9, 9.0.1, 9.2, 9.3, 9.5 (others can be added on demand).

Default EnergyPlus version is 9.5

Default installation location is C:/EnergyPlusV9-5-0/energyplus.exe.

Download and install EnergyPlus from https://energyplus.net/downloads.

If you install EnergyPlus 9.5.0 to the default location mentioned above, you can skip the following step. Otherwise, set follwoing environment variables to point to a specific EnergyPlus installation:

ENERGYPLUS_VER

ENERGYPLUS_EXE

e.g. for EPlus 9.5.0 that would be

ENERGYPLUS_VER = 9.5.0

ENERGYPLUS_EXE = C:/EnergyPlusV9-5-0/energyplus.exe

2. Python

CESAR-P supports Python 3.8. Download and Install from https://www.python.org/downloads/. Newer Python Versions might well work, but are not fully tested.

If you already have a different Python version installed, do not tick ‘Add Python X.Y to Path’ during installation procedure.

Note: using Anaconda is not recommended, as it might be more complicated to handle with your IDE

3. Create Python virtual environment

  • Open a shell, create & activate a virtual environment (based on the Python 3.8). E.g do:

    • Check if required python version is system default with

      python -version

    • If NOT preceed python with the path to your python installation in the following commands

    • Create a new virtual environment (you can adapt the location of the venv as you wish - any location on a fileserver with all dependencies the virtual environment will need some space).

      python -m venv %USERPROFILE%/venv-cesar-p

    • Then activate your venv with

      %USERPROFILE%/venv-cesar-p/Scripts/activate

4. cesar-p-core library

Note: in case you use Anaconda, install shapely respectively geos with conda before installing CESAR-P (conda install -c conda-forge shapely). When running CESAR-P you might get an error that geos_c.dll was not found, which is hopefully prevented with installing shapley with conda. If you nevertheless get that error, try searching for that DLL in your conda environment where you did install shapley and copy-paste the geos.dll and geos_c.dll to the locatation mentioned in the error you get.

There are different options to install from

  1. (Default) Install the latest released open-source version from PyPi package repository:

pip install cesar-p

  1. Install a older released open-source version from PyPi package repository:

pip install cesar-p==1.3.0

  1. Install from GitHub Repository directly, e.g. if you need a special tag or the latest development version that was not released

    pip install git+https://github.com/hues-platform/cesar-p-core@1.3.0

5. optional: geopandas (for shp input file)

If you will use shp input files for your site vertices, then you must install geopandas. Unfortunately it can not be automated on Windows Systems. On linux, you can just install geopandas and it will install the dependencies to GDAL and fiona for you.

  1. Download GDAL and fiona wheels from https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs Make sure to pick the x32 or x64 version according to your hardware and the matching python version (cpXX)

  2. pip install GDAL and fiona (pip install downloaded-package-name.whl).

    pip install downloaded-gdal-package.whl
pip install downloaded-fiona-package.whl

  3. install now geopandas

    pip install geopandas

if you want to check which version is the default, check this in the source repository in pyproject.toml.

  1. If you get errors when running cesar-p using the shape file parser,

    you probably need to manually copy geos_c.dll, geos.dll to MY_VIRTUAL_ENV/Library/bin from a geopandas installation with conda. This is the same step as you most probably already did for the shapely installation in case you work with Anaconda environments.

See also https://github.com/Toblerity/Fiona#windows for installation instructions for fiona package.

Update the cesar-p-core library

  • Just redo the pip install command you used for installing the package