Cairn Tool

What is Cairn?

• Cairn is an optimizer tool for energy system studies. It allows to perform techno-economic and environmental analysis of energy systems by optimization of both the sizing of power systems and the operation planning.

• Cairn is based on the Mixed Integer Linear Progamming formalism (MILP).

• Cairn has been build to allow for several purposes :

  • allow to build any architecture of multi-energy system with a verified library of components.

  • allow non-specialists to build easily optimisation problems, and analyze the results.

Important

• This guide gathers all the usefull information for users of Cairn.

• For more information, developpers can contact The Cairn team.

Start with Cairn

• Overview of the Cairn tool
  • Cairn principles
  • Modelling principles of Cairn
  • Screenshots
  • Historic
  • Citing
• Installing Cairn
  • Dependencies
  • Standalone installation
  • Python package installation

Cairn Open User Guide Lines

• Energy Carriers
  • How to set parameters and options of an energy carrier?
  • How to set my own units?
• Cairn timeseries files
• Performance maps
• Economic modelling guidelines
  • What are the possible ways to consider costs at a component level?
  • How is the economic aspect considered at a project level?
• Environmental impacts
• MultiConverter usage
  • Principles
  • Advanced example of use: High Temperature Steam Electrolysis
• Rolling Horizon
  • What is rolling horizon?
  • How to set the rolling horizon mode?

Cairn Viewer Guide

• Build a problem
  • Getting started: Launch Cairn
  • Drag and drop components
  • How to link components?
  • How to manage big architectures?
  • How to use groups?
  • Upload the Input time series
  • Set Model Parameters
  • Set Base Components Parameters
• Display results
  • Plot TimeSeries
  • Plotter Menu
  • Load Result TimeSeries
• Shortcuts and options
  • How to use shortcuts in Cairn?
  • Default ports
  • How to change the size of a component?
  • Display the components to be sized
  • Show/Hide MultiObjective components
  • Display the map
• Setting new indicators
• Post-processing
  • The configuration file
  • Basic graphs
  • Parametrizable global graphs

API Guide

• Cairn API documentation
  • Description of the API
  • Example through a notebook

Components description

• Cairn Open SubModels
  • Principles
  • Submodels summary
  • Submodels documentation description
  • Units
  • Technical models
  • Converter models
  • Storage models
  • Grid models
  • SourceLoad models
  • Bus submodels
  • Operation constraint models
  • Physical equations

Contact us

• The Cairn team
• Bugs and suggestions
• Other requests and remarks

FAQ-Glossary-Ref.

• Glossary