Run time of the USACE‑SWD models is always an important feature to consider. See Improving Model Run Performance in Debugging and Analysis for general tips and approaches.

The following items are specific tips for USACE‑SWD models.

The following sections describe changes to the code to specifically improve performance in USACE‑SWD models.

The default behavior in RiverWare is for objects to dispatch whenever they have adequate information to do so. It was noted in the analyses that objects were dispatching well into the future beyond the end of the forecast period at the current timestep due to the step response routing method on reaches that distributes a current inflow into outflows at future timesteps. No information beyond the forecast period is used for calculations at the current timestep, and information from dispatching beyond the forecast period is overwritten anyway by subsequent calculations as the model steps forward. Dispatching beyond the end of the forecast period is, therefore, not necessary.

To limit dispatching to the forecast period only, changes were made to the controller. At the beginning of the run, the flood basin computational object tells the controller what the forecast period is. If there are multiple flood basin computational objects, the controller uses the largest forecast period. At the beginning of each timestep, the controller calculates the end time of the forecast period by adding the forecast period to the current controller time. A condition was added to the checkDispatching method so that if the date of the dispatch is beyond the end time of the forecast period, the dispatch entry is not put on the dispatch queue for solving.

The step response routing method in reach calculates and sets outflow values into future timesteps. If the timesteps are beyond the end of the forecast period, this work is unnecessary because this information is not needed in the model for solving at the current timestep.

The step response routing method was modified so that if forecasting is being used, the reach asks the controller for the end time of the forecast period. The step response calculations are then limited so that outflow values are not calculated or set beyond the end of the forecast period.

On the computational subbasin, there was significant time spent getting the appropriate control point and looking up the routing vector on its routing coefficients slot for the upstream reservoir.

Instead of doing this lookup each time, the code was changed to cache the routing vector information on a data structure in the computational object the first time coefficients are requested for a particular upstream and downstream object pair. Subsequent requests can then access the routing information from the data structure instead of redoing the lookup. If variable routing coefficients that can change with each timestep are being used, the data structure is cleared at the beginning of each timestep. Otherwise, the data structure can be used throughout the whole run.

In analyzing dispatching, it was noted that excess dispatching occurs where values have been set on a number of different objects across the model. Dispatching order in RiverWare is based on a queue where objects dispatch in the order in which they come onto the queue. For example, in flood control where a value is set on each reservoir in the system, the reservoirs all go onto the queue and each reservoir dispatches in order before any objects dispatch that have come onto the queue as a result of the reservoir dispatches. This means the effect of an upstream reservoir's dispatching is not propagated to the downstream reservoir before it dispatches the first time, so it must go back on the queue to dispatch again (and maybe a third or fourth time due to additional upstream reservoirs).

To address this problem, a custom downstream dispatch order was implemented. The first time custom dispatching is called, the rule controller creates an ordered upstream to downstream list of objects in the network based on the topology information of upstream and downstream links between objects. Custom dispatching then iterates the dispatch queue successively for each object in the ordered list and dispatches all of that object's entries so that a downstream object does not dispatch before upstream effects have been propagated to it.

There is overhead associated with iterating the queue by object, so custom dispatching is only called in places where a number of objects across the basin are being put on the queue at the same time. For the COE model this has been implemented for computing incremental local inflows, the flood control rule, and the hydropower rule.