The principal use of MISER to date is in monthly production planning at a strategic level. In this capacity, MISER is used to derive an optimal operating policy for the forthcoming month, ensuring that predicted demand is met at least cost, whilst complying with operating constraints such as licences and water quality, maintaining reservoirs at prudent levels, and paying heed to the longer term (e.g. next 1-2 years). Different rainfall conditions can be analysed including dry weather scenarios to assess the need for potential drought control measures.
Users enter data such as licence usage to date, initial reservoir levels, planned outages and forecast demands. Where available, these data can also be extracted automatically from corporate databases and telemetry systems using an on-line connection. By optimising over the whole horizon, MISER ensures optimal management of annual licences and reservoir storage, managing the conflicts between short and long-term objectives. System infrastructural constraints are modelled, taking account of the total cost of water from source to demand. The resultant production plan is expressed in terms of abstractions, bulk transfers and changes in major storage volumes. Production plans are revised monthly, or more frequently if conditions change significantly from those anticipated.
It is essential within water supply operations to have consistency between medium and short-term production planning. The production plan results can be used to provide operating envelopes for short-term planning/pump scheduling, such as through reservoir targets, annual licence usage limits and import/export targets. Utilising the same modelling tool for both short and medium-term assists greatly with this process.
Further examples of production planning are provided in the CIWEM 2004 paper available in publications.
