MISER

From TYNEMARCH web site:

MISER is a highly configurable and flexible suite of decision-support tools for optimal water management, asset and resource planning. MISER is in regular use by water professionals to solve a wide variety of operational and investment planning problems:

• Monthly production planning
• Water resources planning
• Pump scheduling
• Investment planning
• Outage analysis

MISER Model Features
There is a broad range of component and constraint types which can be entered into the MISER model:

• Streamflows as historical time series, with probabilistic inflow sequence generation, and flow duration and frequency analysis
• Configurable licences, including rolling, seasonal, minimum/maximum, prescribed/maintained, individual/group, restricted days and conditional abstraction
• Reservoir capacities, operating volumes, targets and operational/drought control rules
• Reservoir levels as historical time series, for use in simplified groundwater models
• Flow limits, ramp rates, losses and pump performance data
• Costs, including volumetric, flow dependent and electricity tariff
• Outages, describing time-related changes in capacities and pump availabilities
• Blending constraints and other dependencies (e.g. flow A < flow B * 5 + 3 * Res storage Y)
• Demands, future increases, global demand changes and headroom
• Additional constraints using Basic Language macros, e.g. flow A = res volume ^ 3.6
• Investment options (see Investment Planning)
• Sub-models, for modelling changes to the “base” model for scenario planning

Users can add schematic features such as arrows, textboxes and backdrops, as well as embedded objects such as spreadsheets and presentations. Timesteps of half-hourly and longer (e.g. daily, weekly), and profiling of constraints over time, are supported. A key advantage of MISER is the ability to use a single model for a range of both long-term and short-term applications, providing benefits of ease of use, model consistency and simpler maintenance. MISER offers a range of tabulation, graphing and reporting facilities, together with import/export and printing functionality. MISER uses standard Microsoft AccessTM database technology and can be customised to extract data from or provide data to corporate databases. Development of a client-server version of Miser utilising Microsoft SQL-ServerTM is ongoing.

MISER Modes of Operation

Simulation
Simulation is the reproduction of system operation, and usually involves running the model at daily timestep over a long period (e.g. 80 years). Rules are fed into the model to control model behaviour, such as operational control rules and annual licence allocation. This mode of operation is normally used in deployable output assessments and drought simulation modelling for water resources planning.

Optimisation
Optimisation involves identifying the best way to meet a given objective. Runs may be carried out for example over 24 hours for pump scheduling, monthly over 2 years for monthly production planning, or over 25 years for investment planning.

Although cost optimisation is an important aspect of MISER, cost is only one of the optimisation objectives and MISER is commonly used to determine how to operate systems under normal and abnormal conditions where cost is of little significance. Available objectives for optimisation which can be prioritised as appropriate include: meeting demands or minimising any demand deficit, maximising demand (for yield assessment applications), meeting storage targets, minimising changes in flow and pump switches, minimising asset capacity (for sizing of new assets), minimising operating costs and minimising capital costs.

MISER utilises well-established solution methodologies which offer both high performance, in terms of speed of optimisation and size of problem, and robustness: solutions are independent of initial conditions and are produced reliably with little attention.

A key feature of MISER is the ability to optimise the entire horizon in a single step, rather than in a piecemeal fashion. As a result, MISER can utilise all available knowledge of future conditions, such as forecast demands and inflows, planned outages, reservoir targets, water quality variations and cost variations. Combined with a wide-ranging model of the system, MISER can identify operation which is fully integrated both spatially and temporally.

For more information see the MISER web page.