An open source TIMES/MIRO app - introducing MIRO 1.1.0

Posted on: 03 Jul, 2020 MIRO Features Conference Report

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, the 77th Semi-annual ETSAP workshop was held virtually from 2nd-3rd July 2020. The ETSAP Executive Committee meeting was also held virtually on 2nd July 2020.

Our Fred Fiand had a joint presentation at the meeting on Thursday, July 2nd, at 16:45 - 17:00:

An open-source TIMES/MIRO app
Mr. Frederik Fiand, GAMS, Dr. Evangelos Panos, PSI, Gary Goldstein, DWG
You can download the presentation slides .

The video of the presentation is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbavrEXVzvI&feature=youtu.be

The work presented by Fred was only possible with the recently released MIRO 1.1.
Read more about the TIMES/MIRO app and the new MIRO features below:

TIMES is a sophisticated energy model generator implemented in GAMS. It has been published under an open source license in 2019. Recently, GAMS joined forces with experienced TIMES users to develop an open-source TIMES/MIRO App that serves as a frontend to the TIMES model.

A key feature of the new MIRO release is the “data cube concept” that allows browsing input and output data with a powerful new MIRO pivot table. This pivot table is designed to work with large data sets (> 1 million records) and provides an intuitive interface to explore your data interactively.

You want to filter, aggregate or pivot your data? Give the pivot renderer of GAMS MIRO 1.1 a try! When developing this new renderer, we were inspired by the GDX viewer of the old GAMS IDE that most of our customers are familiar with. We wanted to incorporate many of the features, like drag and drop support as well as filtering of domains. On top of that we added many new features that we believe will make working with your data even more efficient. You can filter domains by one or multiple elements and even aggregate domains by one of several aggregation functions (sum, mean, count etc.). Furthermore, the MIRO pivot table seamlessly integrates with charting facilities to plot line charts or bar charts. For the TIMES/MIRO app we also added experimental support to store and load pivot table configurations - so called “views”. So far, this feature is not officially supported and we do not recommend using it in production. However, it gives you an idea of what’s to come in GAMS MIRO 1.2!

In addition to the all new pivot renderer, the TIMES/MIRO app integrates an option to offload the actual solving to the NEOS Server which makes it particularly useful for TIMES users operating on a tight budget.

TIMES Models can become huge and require large amounts of data. The TIMES/MIRO App has proven its efficiency in this regards and makes handling large amounts of data (e.g. for the TIMES-DK_COMETS model) a piece of cake.

Try the TIMES/MIRO app for yourself in our GAMS MIRO gallery !