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Welcome to the FlexMeasures documentation!

FlexMeasures is the intelligent & developer-friendly backend to support real-time energy flexibility apps, rapidly and scalable.

In a world with renewable energy, flexibility is crucial and valuable, e.g. for demand response. Planning ahead allows flexible assets to serve the whole system with their flexibility, e.g. by shifting or curtailing energy use.

Developing energy flexibility services is expensive work. FlexMeasures is designed to be developer-friendly, which helps you to go to market quickly, while keeping the costs of software development at bay. FlexMeasures delivers:

  • Real-time data intelligence & integration
  • Uncertainty models
  • App-building (API/UI/CLI & plugin support)

A quick glance at usage

A tiny, but complete example: Let's install FlexMeasures from scratch. Then, using only the terminal, load hourly prices and optimize a 12h-schedule for a battery that is half full at the beginning.

$ pip install flexmeasures
$ docker pull postgres; docker run --name pg-docker -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=docker -e POSTGRES_DB=flexmeasures-db -d -p 5433:5432 postgres:latest 
$ export SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI="postgresql://postgres:docker@127.0.0.1:5433/flexmeasures-db" && export SECRET_KEY=notsecret 
$ flexmeasures db upgrade  # create tables
$ flexmeasures add toy-account --kind battery  # setup account & a user, a battery (Id 2) and a market (Id 3)
$ flexmeasures add beliefs --sensor-id 3 --source toy-user prices-tomorrow.csv  # load prices, also possible per API
$ flexmeasures add schedule --sensor-id 2 --optimization-context-id 3 \
    --from ${TOMORROW}T07:00+01:00 --duration PT12H \
    --soc-at-start 50% --roundtrip-efficiency 90%  # this is also possible per API
$ flexmeasures show beliefs --sensor-id 2 --from ${TOMORROW}T07:00:00+01:00 --duration PT12H  # also visible per UI, of course

We discuss this in more depth at tut_toy_schedule.

Use cases

As possible users, we see energy service companies (ESCOs) who want to build real-time apps & services around energy flexibility for their customers, or medium/large industrials who are looking for support in their internal digital tooling.

However, even small companies and hobby projects might find FlexMeasures useful!

The three ways in which FlexMeasures supports developers:

Real-time data intelligence & integration

Energy flexibility services need to interact multiple times per day or hour. We equipped FlexMeasures with:

  • Support for real-time updates
  • Forecasting for the upcoming hours
  • Schedule optimization
  • Extensions for integrating data, e.g. from ENTSO-E or OpenWeatherMap

Uncertainty models

Dealing with uncertain forecasts and outcomes is crucial.

FlexMeasures is therefore built on the timely-beliefs framework, so we model this real-world aspect accurately.

App building

Building customer-facing apps & services is where developers make impact. We make their work easy.

  • Well-documented API and CLI
  • Plugin support (add your own logic)
  • Backend UI and support for plotting
  • Multi-tenancy

For more on FlexMeasures services, read services. Or head right over to getting_started.

Using FlexMeasures benefits operators as well as asset owners, by allowing for automation, insight, autonomy and profit sharing. For more on benefits, consult benefits.

FlexMeasures is compliant with the Universal Smart Energy Framework (USEF). Therefore, this documentation uses USEF terminology, e.g. for role definitions. The intended users of FlexMeasures are a Supplier (energy company) and its Prosumers (asset owners who have energy contracts with that Supplier). The platform operator of FlexMeasures can be an Aggregator.

getting-started configuration changelog

concepts/benefits concepts/benefits_of_flex concepts/inbuilt-smart-functionality concepts/algorithms concepts/security_auth

tut/toy-example-from-scratch tut/posting_data tut/forecasting_scheduling tut/building_uis

views/dashboard views/admin

api/introduction api/v3_0 api/v2_0 api/v1_3 api/v1_2 api/v1_1 api/v1 api/dev api/change_log

cli/commands cli/change_log

dev/introduction dev/data dev/api dev/ci dev/plugins dev/auth dev/error-monitoring dev/modes

int/introduction

Code documentation

Go To source.