Integrate gridlab-d with helics

[AyhemAllouache]

Hello everyone,
Is there any good instructions and commands on how to link gridlab-d with helics, i have successfuly installed helics but when i install gridlab-d and specify the helics flag, when i try a simple example after it does not work.

[trevorhardy]

@afisher1, can you take this one?

[afisher1]

Hello Ayhem,

Please take a look at GridLAB-D build instructions located here. https://gridlab-d.shoutwiki.com/wiki/CMake_Build. Depending on if you installed HELICS on your system such that the helics source libraries are located in a nonstandard directory(pip install, custom install directory) you will have to set another variable -DGLD_HELICS_DIR=custom helics source dir/lib or lib64/cmake/HELICS. Also if this is built in a windows environment you will need to install the msys2 package of HELICS and link with that library when building GridLAB-D. The prebuilt windows binaries or python package will not work with GridLAB-D.

[AyhemAllouache]

the link does not work

[afisher1]

lastly make sure the path to libhelics.dll is added to your system PATH variable in the windows environment. For linux systems, make sure LD_LIBRARY_PATH has the path the libhelics.so. For MacOS, the variable is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH and should have the path to libhelics.dylib.

[AyhemAllouache]

Thank you for you response and instructions afisher1.
The first mistake i did is not using the "develop" branch of gridlab-d, by changing to that branch i was able to connect gridlab-d with helics. I found instructions here that helped me figure out about this : https://github.com/GMLC-TDC/HELICS/discussions/2224
i used this to build gridlabd :

cmake .. \
  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/gridlabd-install \
  -DGLD_USE_HELICS=ON \
  -DHELICS_DIR=/usr/local/ \
  -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-g -O0 -w" \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-g -O0 -w -std=c++14" \
  -DCMAKE_EXE_LINKER_FLAGS="-g -O0 -w"

And i used cmake .. -LH, to find the right flags for enabling helics support.

For helics build i used this to be able to run the examples on the project : cmake .. -DHELICS_BUILD_EXAMPLES=ON

by doing all these i was able to run the example on : HELICS-Tutorial/tutorials/1-DistributionFederation-ManualStart , by modifying some of the code in the example, because some functions are outdated i think.
In the other hand the couldn't run the example of "Tutorial-2-DistributionFederation-HELICSRunner" with helics run ... . I keep getting this error AttributeError: module 'helics' has no attribute ""

I'm little new to simulation and co-simulation, so it's little fuzzy to debug some of the problems

[AyhemAllouache]

If you could updated the examples and tutorials provided, to work with new versions of gridlab-d and helics, it would be very helpful.
Thank you.

[trevorhardy]

Yeah, we need to take a look at this. Like you said it is an old example and is effectively unmaintained. We need to decide if we should update it or clearly mark it as unmaintained so others don't experience the same problems you did.

If you have changes you'd like to commit back, you could do so.