"Comfort" Objective

[Avinasshini Seran]

Hi all,

We have been ironing out the exact characteristics of our agents and have settled upon all agents being Kenyan consumers, separated largely as rural and urban consumers with each having different appetites for LCOE, Capex and Fuel Consumption Costs for Business-As-Usual.

We wanted to include consumer behaviour regarding indoor air pollution as well. 

We noticed the "Comfort" objective for agents and were wondering if you could explain exactly how MUSE calculates this and if we would be able to somehow connect indoor air pollution with it through perhaps distinct "comfort indices" for each technology? 

Furthermore, if this is possible, how would we be able to modify MUSE to achieve this?

Many thanks,

Mia and Avi

[sara giarola]

The comfort objective works filtering technologies having the specified comfort index desired by the agent. So for example, if a certain value of comfort is assigned to the agent comfort threshold, among the technologies available, those filtered positively have the same comfort value as the threshold and are suitable to be bought.

It may be possible to associate a comfort index to each technology and considering it associated to an air pollution metric. It may be more straightforward, though, to add a cost to air pollutants and have it among the agents objectives.

[Mia McLachlan]

Hi Sara,

If we were to assign each technology a comfort index, which file would we need modify to do this? Also, does the function work in a optimisation sense e.g maximise comfort whereby technologies with a higher index would be favoured or do agents accept any technologies above their threshold value with no preference?

We considered associating a cost to air pollutants but we don't want these costs to affect the LCOE and Kenya does not currently have any announced air pollution taxes.

Best wishes,

Mia & Avi

[sara giarola]

comfort needs to be added to the technodata row by row hus being assigned to each single technology.

If you define comfort as an objective the model will choose technologies to maximise it.

[Mia McLachlan]

Understood, thank you. We were also wondering whether our comfort 'value' should be an integer (like a ranking for each technology) or a proportion out of 1. Also will we need to register the comfort objective on the TOML?

Best wishes,

Avi and Mia

[Mia McLachlan]

Futher to this, we have tried running MUSE, again with a single agent, with the objective of maximising comfort. We are currently obtaining a 'Runtime Error' with the warning message:

'Asset dimensions do not match: ('region', 'asset', 'year') vs Frozen(SortedKeysDict({'asset': 7, 'year': 7}))'. Do you have any idea what may be causing this?

Many thanks,

Avi and Mia

[sara giarola]

No, comfort is already implemented as a function and it does not need to be added in the TOML. If you are using it as an objective it needs to be added in the Agents.csv, in the objective section.

Although there is some arbitrariety in the absolute value fof "comfort", as I think itmay makes more sense to just see it as a relative number, the value ultimately depends on your scale of comfort values and the fact this value should not skew too much the weighted sum with the other objectives (ii.e. try to bear in mind the proportion of the quantities you are dealing with among the objectives: ideally you would like a situation where a weight like 0.333 would sum with equally importance the value of the three objectives).

[sara giarola]

It is saying that "region" is missing in the asset dimensions. The reason for this may not be unique; probably worth starting from the input data and check that all the attributes for the technologies are properly defined.

[Mia McLachlan]

Do we need to include comfort in any of the other input files (e.g. Global commodities)? At this point our input files are identical to the ones we were successfully running before we started using the comfort as an agent objective.

Best wishes,

Avi and Mia

[Mia McLachlan]

This is the error message we are getting 

[Alexander Kell]

Could you upload the input files for the model you are using so I could take a look?

Thanks,

Alex

[Mia McLachlan]

Yes sure!