An "Application Design Workshop" was hosted at the William Penney Laboratory in Imperial College (London) on 22 June to identify and agree upon components of the THERMOS project software application. The workshop was the first step in an iterative process to develop and refine the THERMOS model specification based on user-feedback from the project pilot and replication cities.

The cities present were invited to provide details about their municipal needs, in order to relate user requirements to THERMOS modelling choices. The cities, which included ICLEI Member city Warsaw (Poland), as well as Jelgava (Latvia), the London Borough of Islington (UK), Granollers (Spain) and the Greater London Authority (UK), gave their perspectives on the software blueprint presented by leading modelling partners Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) and Imperial College. To help the programmers further shape the tool and identify areas of commonality and difference, the cities outlined their specific energy planning challenges, along with special aspects or requirements to be considered.

Josh Thumim, Project Director at CSE, explains further: “Each city has somewhat different needs as a result of its individual circumstances, and these workshops are about exploring how we can produce a tool which is both technically robust and sufficiently flexible for the intended user-groups.” The second half of 2017 will see the completion of the initial application design and production of the first version of the application software. CSE is keen to keep to schedule: “Our aim is to get the pilot cities testing the THERMOS tool early in the project so we have plenty of time to roll out our replication programme and focus on dissemination and user-training.”

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