Operating Rule Concept
In order to achieve the best possible water resource management of reservoir systems, you need instructions that clearly define how water should be stored, released or distributed under given system loads and conditions. These instructions are summarized in an operating plan. An operating plan can consist of many individual instructions, e.g. the compliance with a certain release amount depending on the storage volume. An individual instruction can be called an operating rule.
Since the formulation of an operating rule is always associated with a corrective intervention in the natural flow behaviour, in order to be able to execute the operating rule you must also be able to change the flow in some way. Only few water resource management elements are suitable for this purpose. Normally these will be reservoirs with adjustable releases. Apart from that, there are also controllable diversion structures or weirs. In Talsim-NG the system elements reservoir and diversion offer the possibility to be controlled by operating rules.
The purpose of all operating rules is to adapt system states of a water resources system in order to meet specified objectives. It is irrelevant where the system states and target variables occur, as long as the target variables can be influenced by a change in the system states.
In the following
- typical operating rules for the operation of dams are presented
- the regularities are abstracted
- the calculation scheme for implementation in the simulation is derived
- an example shows the implementation of an operating plan in Talsim-NG