JuRSE Code of the Month - February 2026

Each month we highlight a code from Forschungszentrum Jülich and this month's code is ETHOS.FINE, co-developed at the Institute of Climate and Energy Systems, Jülich Systems Analysis (ICE-2).

ETHOS.FINE
The Framework for Integrated Energy System Assessment (FINE), which is part of the ETHOS model suite (Energy Transformation PatHway Optimization Suite), provides a framework for modeling, optimizing and assessing energy systems. Systems with multiple regions, commodities and time steps can be modeled, where the target of the optimization is the minimization of the systems net present value under technical and environmental constraints.

JuRSE selected highlights
ETHOS.FINE is part of the much larger ETHOS model suite, but it is by far the most prominent one when it comes to plain software metrics like GitHub stars, forks, or citations: At the time of writing the RSD lists a whooping 1132 mentions of this package (currently the FZJ software with the most mentions in the RSD), 86 stars and 49 forks on GitHub. We know that sheer numbers are not everything, but this still very impressive. They have institutional support for the ETHOS suite, a great documentation, a dedicated JOSS paper, and clearly a user base that knows how to acknowledge research software.

More information
Website: https://vsa-fine.readthedocs.io
RSD: https://helmholtz.software/software/ethosfine-framework-for-integrated-energy-system-assessment
GitHub: https://github.com/FZJ-IEK3-VSA/FINE