Version v0.17 of FlexMeasures lets you elevate some accounts to be consultants of other accounts. It also increases robustness of scheduling, by using fallbacks. And a new favicon!
See changelog for a complete list or read on below about the larger new features we added.
Consultancy
FlexMeasures is a good fit for ESCos - energy service companies who work for clients like businesses or households, and optimize their energy management.
Both the ESCo and the client should have distinct accounts in FlexMeasures. And the ESCo should be able to consult their clients, for instance for servicing questions and problems. And this means to see their data.
We now enabled that. This unlocks using FlexMeasures in more powerful hosting scenarios.
Each account can now have a consultant account linked. Users in that account who have the role consultant will now be able to see the client's asset and data. In the UI, each client's account page shows who their consultant is, and consultants will see who their client accounts are and can access them from there. The API also allows read access for consultants.
Future work might add the ability to also add or edit assets and sensors.
Fallback schedulers
Sometimes a schedule might not be feasible. This happens for example when a strict state-of-charge target for a storage was set, but can't be reached in time. In FlexMeasures, a fallback scheduler can then try to reach as close to that target as possible. But it's crucial to deal with this situation and visualize it.
We enabled for FlexMasures hosts that they separate background jobs in this case (e.g. one run by StorageScheduler and one run by FallbackStorageScheduler). By giving them distinct data sources, it can also be visualized better in the UI that the schedules are somewhat different (a "perfect" one and a "good enough" one).
This work was done in Pull Request 846, 841, 888 and 891.
New favicon:
We noticed that the FlexMeasures UI was not using a favicon which represents its logo (within LF Energy). Pull request 895 adds it!
