Installation

Supported Environments#

Power Balance Models (PBM) has been confirmed to work on:

Ubuntu 22.04 - 24.04
Windows 10*

* using Python for Windows and CMD.

The PBM is not tested on Mac systems. The software requires:

Python >= 3.8.6. Recommended version is 3.11.9, which you can download from the bottom of the page here);
OpenModelica >= 1.20. Recommended version is 1.23.1, which you can download from here (Windows) or here (Unix) (instructions in https://www.openmodelica.org/download/download-linux). Installation on Mac (not stable) can be found here;

It is recommended you run the software from within a virtual environment system such as PyEnv or the built-in venv module, this ensures there is no interference with your system python installation. Alternatively you can install it under the current user.

Installation for UNIX and Windows#

Downloads are available here. You can install the package using pip on the wheels file:

pip install power_balance-<version>-py3-none-any.whl

To install this package you will firstly need to install OpenModelica to your system. The module works by either finding the location of an omc installation (in the case of UNIX) or using the environment variable %OPENMODELICAHOME% in the case of Windows.

Installing OpenModelica Compiler#

For Windows users will need to install the complete OpenModelica application using the dedicated installer found on the project website.

Linux users only require omc and the Modelica Standard Library, see here.

Installation on Mac is not tested and not supported by the Power Balance team, primarily because of the difficulty associated with installing OpenModelica on Mac.

Updating PowerBalance Installation

Note, if updating your version of powerbalance, it is strongly recommended that you re-generate the model profiles in case changes have been made which affect them:

powerbalance generate-profiles

Modelica Standard Library version

The Power Balance Models API is not compatible with Modelica Standard Library <4.0.0. Significant changes have been implemented in these versions. Latest known working environment is OpenModelica 1.23.1 with MSL 4.0.0.

Testing#

You can verify your install is working correctly by either running the default configuration using the powerbalance command, or by running the included tests using pytest:

pytest -s tests/