User Guidelines and Notice

Copyright 2017-18 IIASA Energy Program

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Introduction

This document specifies the guidelines for using the MESSAGEix framework and the ix modeling platform. The aim of these guidelines is to ensure best scientific practice and collaborative development of the platform.

Documentation and further information is available at http://ene.software.iiasa.ac.at/ixmp/. The framework is available for download at http://github.com/iiasa/ixmp. Please refer to the website and repository for the most up-to-date version of the code base.

The community mailing list for questions and discussions on new features is hosted using Googlegroups. Please join at groups.google.com/d/forum/message_ix and use <message_ix@googlegroups.com> to send an email to the MESSAGEix and ixmp user community.

User Guidelines

A) Reference to the scientific publication and online resources

Please cite the following manuscript when using the MESSAGEix framework and/or the ix modeling platform for scientific publications or technical reports:

Daniel Huppmann, Matthew Gidden, Oliver Fricko, Peter Kolp, Clara Orthofer, Michael Pimmer, Keywan Riahi, and Volker Krey. “The MESSAGEix Integrated Assessment Model and the ix modeling platform”. Electronic pre-print available at pure.iiasa.ac.at/15157/.

Also, please include a hyperlink to the online resource MESSAGEix.iiasa.ac.at in any publication/report, or on a website describing your model or scientific analysis using the MESSAGEix framework.

B) Developing new model instances

Researchers are welcome to develop new model instances using the MESSAGEix framework for their own research interests. However, any such model must be named “MESSAGEix xxx” or “MESSAGEix-xxx”, where ‘xxx’ is replaced by the name of the country/region, institutional affiliation or a similar identifying name. For example, the national model for South Africa developed by Orthofer et al. [1] is called “MESSAGEix South Africa”.

Furthermore, please ensure that there is no naming conflict with existing versions of the MESSAGEix model family. When in doubt, please contact the IIASA Energy Program at <message_ix@iiasa.ac.at>.

C) Notice of new publications

We would appreciate a notice of publications using the MESSAGEix framework and the ix modeling platform. Please send an e-mail to <message_ix@iiasa.ac.at>.

Contributor Guidelines

We appreciate contributions to the code base and development of new features for the framework. Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.rst for details.

References

[1] Clara Orthofer, Daniel Huppmann, and Volker Krey. “South Africa’s shale gas resources - chance or challenge?” 2018, submitted. Electronic pre-print available at pure.iiasa.ac.at/15085/.