virocon

virocon is a Python package to compute environmental contours (user guide).

About

virocon can support you to design marine structures, which need to withstand load combinations based on wave, wind and current. It lets you define extreme environmental conditions with a given return period using the environmental contour method.

The following methods are implemented in virocon:

Defining a joint probability distributions using a global hierarchical model structure
Estimating the parameters of a global hierarchical model ("Fitting")
Computing an environmental contour using either the
- inverse first-order reliability method (IFORM),
- inverse second-order reliability method (ISORM),
- the direct sampling contour method or the
- highest density contour method.
- Futher, "AND" and "OR" exceedance contours can be calculated.

How to use virocon

Requirements

Make sure you have installed Python 3.8 or higher by typing

python --version

in your shell.

(Older version might work, but are not actively tested)

Install

Install the latest version of virocon from PyPI by typing

pip install virocon

Alternatively, you can install from virocon repository’s main branch by typing

pip install https://github.com/virocon-organization/virocon/archive/main.zip

virocon is also available on conda-forge. We recommend to first create a new environment.

conda create --name virocon python=3.10

And then activate that new environment and install virocon.

conda activate virocon
conda install -c conda-forge virocon

Usage

virocon is designed as an importable package.

The folder examples contains python files that show how one can import and use virocon.

As an example, to run the file hstz_contour_simple.py, type

python examples\hstz_contour_simple.py

Documentation

Learn. Our user guide covers installation, requirements and overall work flow.

Code. The code’s documentation can be found here.

Paper. Our SoftwareX paper "ViroCon: A software to compute multivariate extremes using the environmental contour method." provides a concise description of virocon version 1 and our update paper describes the changes introduced in virocon version 2.

Conference presentation. In a WESC 2021 presentation, we showed how virocon can be used to support the design process of offshore wind turbines.

Contributing

Issue. If you spotted a bug, have an idea for an improvement or a new feature, please open a issue. Please open an issue in both cases: If you want to work on it yourself and if you want to leave it to us to work on it.

Fork. If you want to work on an issue yourself please fork the repository, then develop the feature in your copy of the repository and finally file a pull request to merge it into our repository.

Conventions. We use PEP8.