In "Reservoir Operations - The Basics" and "Reservoir Operations - The Rules", you learned the basics about developing an Operation Set to guide how your reservoir should make its release decisions. In this chapter, you will learn about the additional features that can be added to your network and to its reservoirs' operation sets to allow you to specify more complex objectives and constraints on the operation of your reservoirs. You will also learn about the network data importer that can be used to import or copy model data from one network to another.
The first part of the chapter describes some advanced tools that you can use to define your reservoir and diversion operations. These tools provide additional flexibility and control over the conditions that activate one or more rules, influence the desired release from a rule (or diversion), or even define a zone. These tools are IF_Blocks, State Variables, and Scripted Rules.
The next part of the chapter describes the advanced operational features that can be added to the operation set of a reservoir. These features include: Capacity Outages, Storage Credit, Release Decision Schedule, and Projected Elevation. Each of these features has a unique influence on the overall reservoir operation; their influence is not zone-based and doesn't fit into the zone-rules portion of the operation set. These features are specified on the remaining sub-tabs of the Reservoir Editor's Operations tab; but each tab must be activated by selecting the feature from the Operations menu of the Reservoir Editor.
The last part of this chapter steps back from the reservoir operations to describe the two network properties importers that are available in ResSim. One of these importers will copy a whole reservoir network from another watershed into the current watershed. The other importer will copy data from an existing network into the current (open) network.