| Building Better Models Through Collaboration: Lessons from Alabama Power Company’s RiverWare Development |
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Josh Free—Alabama Power and Abby Watson—RTI International |
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ABSTRACT |
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Does a developer have the budget to learn every nuance of an operator’s job? Does an operator have the time to learn RPL or learn to construct a RiverWare model? Although the default answer is typically no, we have found that the more effort each side expends to learn from the other, the higher the quality and performance of the resulting model to meet the intended needs. Alabama Power funded two distinct phases of the RiverWare development for their system of reservoirs. In the first, the aim was to mirror the operations of an existing ResSim model. With limited input from operators, the initial RiverWare model struggled to reflect critical operational details, resulting in frequent failures and unreliable outputs. The second development phase was a one-year collaborative effort between RTI and APCO. During this time period, APCO learned to manipulate the model and to develop RiverWare RPL code. Similarly, RTI watched how APCO operated their system of reservoirs, learned APCO’s thought process for making release decisions, and developed a clearer understanding of the specifics of the plants. The result was a contractor who truly knew the demands of their user, and a customer who understood the details of their model and was confident in working with the model, ultimately leading to a better, more sustainable end product. This presentation will step through our development process, will provide some detail regarding the challenges of specific operations, and will discuss the benefits of the deeper collaboration established in the second year. |
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