Upgrades module produces plots in .pdf format

[daniel-thom]

I ran the upgrades module and noticed that it produced 7 images as .pdf files. Is that what we want? Maybe that is best. I'm just wondering if it's better to make .png files. Should we aggregate all images into one file/report? Should any of this be customizable for the URBANopt integration? We haven't discussed any requirements about plots.

Update: we agreed that all plots should go into one file. If there are multiple scenarios (pf1 + volt-var), there should be one file per scenario.

[ann-sherin]

I'm open to the format of the figures. I created pdf since it maintains a good resolution, and we can zoom in if needed. So can be usable for any presentations.

Aggregating them into one file/report is a possible route we could take, to reduce the number of files produced.
I know we generally want to keep the number of output files as low as possible.

As for urbanopt, we can discuss with the team- I do think having plots would be a good capability to have. Can have a configurable parameter.

[tarekelgindy]

I think that aggregating the figures is something that makes sense to have as a user option. The most likely use-case for this would be multiple scenarios being aggregated into one report. Definitely agree that having plots in UrbanOpt will be a good capability to have.

[daniel-thom]

@tarekelgindy Let's be more clear about this. DISCO will only know about one scenario at a time. We could aggregate the images in a single scenario. We wouldn't be able to aggregate across multiple scenarios unless we added a new command to do this.

Options for aggregations across scenarios:

1. After all scenarios finish, URBANopt aggregates images from individual scenarios into one final report.
2. After all scenarios finish, URBANopt calls a DISCO command (passing all scenario names/paths) to perform the aggregation.

I'm not sure that DISCO would have the proper information to display the images across scenarios appropriately.

[tarekelgindy]

ahh right. In that case it might be better to just output the figures of single scenarios, and decide down the road if aggregating them across scenarios makes sense. My guess is we probably won't end up doing that.