...
Figure 3. Expanded Environmental Flow Manager Conceptual Model: Detailed flowchart for the 'Prioritise and activate/flag actions' box in Figure 2.
Prioritisation of actions/groups within the flow manager
The environmental flow manager sorts groups of actions into ascending priority order by examining the priority values generated for each action by the importance and condition functions.
Priority = (1-Condition) x Importance
If groups have the same priority value, then they are ranked by the importance values, then by condition. The priority of a group is considered to be equal to that of the highest priority action within that group.
Priority can be 0, or even negative, and these are considered a higher priority than any positive value.
The environmental flow manager will not enable an action if it returns an importance value of zero. Groups with any actions with importance > 0 will still be enabled along with any actions in them. To disable a group with multiple actions all actions would need to have importance = 0.
The importance function has no default values and must be specified by the user or else it will be considered to have an importance of 0
The default condition calculation if not specified by the user is EXP(- time since last successful spell/average return interval)
Environmental Flow Prioritsation Phase
All functions are set by default to evaluate at the start of time step, environmental flow prioritisation phase is an advanced usage. If enabling one group has dependencies on another, the functions will need to be evaluated multiple times during prioritisation, and therefore time of evaluation in the Environmental Flow Prioritisation phase is indicated. This allows the cost of actions, and hence groups, to be recalculated based on the groups which have already been enabled or disabled. This recalculation occurs each time a group is enabled or disabled.
Enabling of Actions
An action can be disabled at the node and will be ignored by the flow manager, even if it is in a group.
An action will effectively be disabled if the flow manager does not allocate water to its group, however the action will still monitor the flow based on action definition.
Portfolios
Each account within a portfolio can have a balance adjustment specified.
Portfolio Account Balances + Portfolio Balance Adjustments = Balance considered when evaluating against Estimated Costs David Hehir (Deactivated)