Data Objects hold slots that can be used in your policy either as reference information or as user-defined optimization variables.

Reference data is just values that are known before the optimization run like minimum flows, guide curves, power targets, and so on. You can write policy that uses the values in these slots.

User-defined optimization variables are slots that you want to compute in optimization. They must be series slots or a column of an agg series slot on a data object.

To specify that a series slot on a data object is a user-defined optimization variable, on the Configuration dialog, select the Is User Defined Variable check box. The slot can then participate in an optimization problem, but you must still add policy that defines the equation for this variable to pull it into the problem.

The automatically generated post-opt RBS ruleset includes rules to set the user-defined variable slots to their optimal values.