parasolpy

Python tools for multi-objective decision analysis and visualization, continuing the Parasol project originally published as:

Raseman, W. J., Jacobson, J., & Kasprzyk, J. R. (2019). Parasol: An open source, interactive parallel coordinates library for multi-objective decision making. Environmental Modelling & Software, 116, 153–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2019.03.005

Developed by the Kasprzyk Research Group at CU Boulder.

Status

🚧 Active development. APIs are mostly stable but may change between 0.x releases.

Installation

From PyPI:

pip install parasolpy

Requires Python ≥ 3.12.

From source (for development):

Requires Poetry to be installed on your system (e.g. pipx install poetry):

git clone https://github.com/jrkasprzyk/parasolpy.git
cd parasolpy
poetry install

What's inside

parasolpy bundles several modules for reservoir analysis, streamflow synthesis, multi-objective tradeoff exploration, and supporting plotting and file utilities.

Tradeoff explorer CLI

Once installed, launch an interactive parallel-coordinates explorer against a results folder:

parasolpy-tradeoff path/to/output_folder

Equivalent module invocation (useful during development):

python -m parasolpy.dash_tools path/to/output_folder

Common options:

• --config FILE — override auto-discovered config XML
• --solutions FILE — override auto-discovered solutions CSV
• --title TEXT — heading shown above the plot
• --colorscale NAME — any Plotly named colorscale (default viridis)
• --host HOST / --port PORT — bind address (defaults 127.0.0.1:8050)
• --debug — run Dash in debug mode

RiverWare RDF CLI

Inspect or convert RiverWare .rdf files without writing code:

parasolpy-rdf info path/to/file.rdf
parasolpy-rdf slots path/to/file.rdf [--series-only]
parasolpy-rdf convert path/to/file.rdf --slot "Object.Slot" --output out.csv [--format wide|stacked|long|enriched]

Examples

The examples/ directory contains self-contained scripts that generate their own synthetic data — no external files needed. Run any of them from the repo root:

python examples/01_reservoir_sequent_peak.py
python examples/03_tradeoff_parallel_plot.py
# ...etc.

Figures and CSV/HTML outputs land in examples/_output/. See examples/README.md for the full script list.

Lineage and related packages

This package is developed by the Kasprzyk Research Group at CU Boulder. It is not affiliated with the unrelated parasol or pyparasol packages on PyPI, which are independent projects that share the name.

Citation

If you use parasolpy in academic work, please cite the original Parasol paper linked above.

Development

• Documentation is hosted on Read the Docs. Build it locally with pip install ".[docs]" and sphinx-build -W -b html docs docs/_build/html.
• Cutting a release? See RELEASING.md for the Poetry-based workflow (version bump, build, publish to PyPI, tag, GitHub Release).
• Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.

License

MIT