Investment simulations for Antares studies

The Antares-Xpansion package, works along with RTE's adequacy software Antares that is also hosted on github. Antares-Xpansion aims at performing investment simulations for Antares studies.

Please see the Antares-Xpansion Documentation for an introductory tutorial, and a full user guide. Check out the Antares-Simulator documentation for more insights on Antares.

Antares-Xpansion optimizes the investments on new capacities and transmission lines for an Antares study. Typical uses of Antares-Xpansion are for example:

• long-term scenario building: build an economically consistent long-term generation mix,
• transmission expansion planning : compute the network development which maximizes social welfare.

In an Antares study, the user builds a power system with a network of zones characterised by power plants (with their constraints e.g. max power and costs), power consumption and power transfer between zones (with the import-export transfer capacity and costs).

Antares performs probabilistic simulations of the system throughout many year-long scenarios made of 8760 hourly time frames each. The goal of the Antares simulation is to minimize the expected operation cost during one year.

Given an Antares simulation the user can define some investment candidates in the power network in order to:

• (increase or create) the transfer capacity between areas,
• (increase or create) the maximum power of a generation facility.

Each investment candidate can potentially decrease the variable operational cost of the power system, but induces an additional investment annuity that includes:

• Annualized investment costs to physically build the facility,
• Fixed operational costs and maintenance costs to sustain the operation.

Antares-Xpansion optimizes the investments in order to minimize the global cost, which is the sum of the expected operation cost during one year and the investment annuity.

Antares-Xpansion is currently under development. Feel free to submit any issue.

• Official Documentation
• Antares website
• Antares github
• Antares documentation

Antares-Xpansion is currently released as standalone-portable solution. It can be run either using the single file executable or an archive including multiple binaries called by a driver.

To download the latest version of Antares-Xpansion, visit the release page of Antares-Xpansion repository and download the binary that matches your platform. If you prefer to build the software from the source files, please refer to the developer guide.

Once you have downloaded the archive, extract the files in the folder of your choice. You are now ready to use Antares-Xpansion.

To check the installation, you can open a command prompt in the Antares-Xpansion install directory and run the following command to execute one of the examples included in the package:

antares-xpansion-launcher.exe -i examples\SmallTestFiveCandidates

The user should first create an Antares study that allows for the definition of investment candidates (see the user guide for detailed informations) and create the candidates.ini and settings.ini files in the directory study_path/user/expansion.

Since v0.6.0, Antares-Xpansion includes an experimental graphical interface but it is optimally used as a command line prompt.

1. Open a command prompt in your Antares-Xpansion install directory. By default (on Windows) it is named antaresXpansion-x.y.z-win64 where x.y.z is the version number.

2. Run antares-xpansion-launcher.exe and choose the path to the Antares study with the -i parameter. For example, the following command inside the antares-xpansion-install-dir\ runs one of the examples:

   antares-xpansion-launcher.exe -i examples\SmallTestFiveCandidates

Antares-Xpansion comes with a GUI. The GUI can be launched by running antares-xpansion-ui.exe. For now, this GUI is in the experimental phase.

Antares-Xpansion is developed mainly in C++ and uses a Python runner to drive the execution of multiple executables.

This software suite has been tested under:

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Microsoft Windows with Visual Studio 2019 (64-bit)
• Centos 7

Antares-Xpansion is built using CMake. For build instructions, please visit the developer guide.

• README - This file.
• cmake/ - Files for initializing a solution ready for compilation.
• conception/ - json output description.
• docs/ - Markdown files for documentation generation.
• data_test/ - Free sample data sets.
• src/cpp/ - Source code for cpp application (lpnamer, benders with MPI, benders without MPI, mergeMPS, study updater)
• src/python/ - Python script for Antares-Xpansion launch.