By Edith A. Zagona, Terrance J. Fulp, Richard Shane, Timothy Magee, and H. Morgan Goranflo, Published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association, August 2001.

Abstract: Water management agencies seek the next generation of modeling tools for planning and operating river basins. Previous site-specific models such as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's (USBR) Colorado River Simulation System and Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA) Daily Scheduling Model have become obsolete; however, new models are difficult and expensive to develop and maintain. Previous generalized river basin modeling tools are limited in their ability to represent diverse physical system and operating policy details for a wide range of applications. RiverWare(tm), a new generalized river basin modeling tool, provides a construction kit for developing and running detailed, site-specific models without the need to develop or maintain the supporting software within the water management agency. It includes an extensible library of modeling algorithms, several solvers, and a rich "language" for the expression of operating policy. Its point-and-click graphical interface facilitates model construction and execution, and communication of policies, assumptions and results to others. Applications developed and used by the TVA and USBR demonstrate that a wide range of operational and planning problems on widely varying basins can be resolved using this tool.