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.
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.
