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Environmental Flow Manager

Owned by Meryl McKerrow
Last updated: 12 Oct 2023 by TeamcityVersion comment
7 min read

Environmental Flow Manager (EFM)

The Environmental Flow Manager manages all actions specified at EFNs that have been assigned to the manager. The Environmental Flow Manager ranks actions in priority order based on condition and an importance weighting specified for each action. In a scenario where multiple actions have equal priority rankings, actions will be ordered based on importance, then by condition, and finally by name (alphabetically). The Environmental Flow Manager then determines which actions are to be enabled based on the cost (water requirement) of the action and the water available in portfolio accounts. 

The Environmental Flow Manager has two key functions

  1. To manage the accounting of environmental water portfolios
  2. To manage all actions specified at the Environmental Flow Node(s) that have been assigned to the manager.

The Environmental Flow Manager allows the user to set up portfolios of accounts and to prioritise account and portfolio use. Accounts need to be set up in the Resource Assessment, where the user can specify account entitlements.

By right click on it, the Environmental Flow Manager also allows to add/edit the note. This function is working for each individual portfolio (e.g., Portfolio 1 and Portfolio 2 in Figure 1) or each individual group (e.g., Group 1 or Group 2 in Figure1) as well.

 Figure 1 Environmental Flow Manager Main Menu

Decision point: The Environmental Flow Manager can run every time step. However, with a large model and many actions, this may slow down the model run significantly. Therefore, there is an option to run the EFM less frequent, e.g. fortnightly or monthly. The user can set this up through a function. 

Portfolios

Setting up portfolios: 

Resource Assessment

At the Resource Assessment the user specifies accounts, representing entitlements. The system keeps track of the water usage and water available. Resource Assessment functionality is not specific to the new functionality developed for environmental flows. More information may be found at the scientific reference guide and user guide entries on Resource Assessment.

Some functionality has been added to the Resource Assessment for the EFM: Environmental portfolios can be added as ‘Account Hosts’. The user needs to set-up the Portfolio at the EFM first. At Resource Assessment, the portfolio can then be assigned as Account Host to individual accounts (see ‘Associated Account Host’).

At the EFM, the user can create/add portfolios. The portfolio can then be assigned as Account Host to individual accounts (within the Resource Assessment). These accounts then appear within the portfolio and can be prioritised for their use. Single or multiple accounts may be assigned to contribute to a single portfolio, and prioritised. In a scenario where multiple accounts have equal priority, the Share indicates what percentage of the volume to be accounted will come from which account. Multiple portfolios may be assigned to contribute to a single group, and ordered according to priority. If multiple portfolios within a group have same priority, volume is debited as a 50/50 split between portfolios. An account may only be in one portfolio.

Priority: If a portfolio consists of various accounts, the user can prioritise to dictate from which accounts water will be debited first. Priority is sorted in ascending order, where an account with priority of 1 would be utilised before account with priority of 2.

Share: If multiple accounts have equal priority, the Share indicates what percentage of the volume to be accounted will come from which account.

Balance Adjustment (Reserve): The user can specify a volume or function by which the available water in the account will be adjusted for Environmental Flow Manager priority assessments. A negative Balance Adjustment reserves this volume for later use (and considers this water not available to the Environmental Flow Manager at this stage). A positive Balance Adjustment leads to the Environmental Flow Manager considering an account to have more water available than is currently available, which could be used to represent an expectation of increasing availability.

Note: The Balance Adjustment is set for an account within the portfolio. However, for practical purposes the balance adjustment is done for the whole portfolio. To restrict the balance adjustment to a single account, write a function that returns the min(Account Volume, Adjusted Volume).  

 Balance considered when Evaluating against Estimated Cost = Portfolio Account Balances + Portfolio Balance Adjustments

Figure 2: Resource Assessment Menu, Associating EFM Po rtfolio as an Account Host

Figure 3: Resource Assessment Summary with Environmental Portfolio Account Hosts


 Figure 4: Portfolio Summary at Environmental Flow Manager with Associated Accounts

Groups

Actions can be grouped together. The actions in one group will be prioritised and delivered as a package. All actions need to be assigned to a group, but most groups may consist of a single action.

Figure 5 Environmental Flow Manager Groups Main Menu

Unassigned Actions:

Overview of actions that have not yet been assigned to a group. All actions to be managed by the Environmental Flow Manager must be assigned to a group. A group can have a single or multiple actions, and the node, with all the actions it contains is assigned to the manager once any single action is assigned to a group within the manager. The model will not run if a node is linked to the manger and an action within the node is not assigned to a group. 

Create Group per Selected ActionSelected unassigned actions will be placed in new groups (each action selected action will get its own group).
Create one group for all selected actionsAdds the selected action(s) to one new group. Note: To add actions to already existing groups the user needs to go to the relevant group and add actions there (see below).
Assigned Actions: Overview of the existing groups and the actions included in that group.
Figure 6 Assigning Actions and Portfolios to Groups in the Environmental Flow Manager


Actions

Available Actions:

The drop down list shows all actions that have not yet been assigned to a group. An action can be selected and added to this group. A user can select an Action already included in the group and remove it by deleting that action. 

Cost:

The user needs to define an estimate of the amount of water that will be required to complete an environmental action. The user can estimate an action’s cost through a fixed value, a data source or a function. The user can also use a function to point at a model generated cost estimate “Current Season Cost Estimate” that is available via the Environmental Flow Node at Node>Action>Current Season Cost Estimate. 

The Environmental Flow Manager will consider the estimated cost only before the action is actively being delivered. Once an action is being delivered the EFM will not disable the action, even if estimated cost is greater than the amount available in the account.

The Cost function should be considered a Risk function: If cost is overestimated the action may not be enabled often enough. If the cost is underestimated the action may fail.

Note: Time of Evaluation for this function has to be set to ‘Environmental Flow Prioritisation’. Any variables used in the function, would also need to be set to evaluate during ‘Environmental Flow Prioritisation’, and their Date Range would need to be set to ‘Current Iteration’.

Importance: The user can set-up a function (or a combinations of multiple functions) to calculate the Importance, which determines under which circumstances a particular group of actions should be targeted/prioritised. Time of Evaluation for this function has to be set to ‘Environmental Flow Prioritisation’. If the Importance is zero, the actions will not be considered/activated.

The user can define the importance of an action to determine under which circumstances a particular group of actions should be targeted/prioritised. Importance is sorted in descending order, where an Importance of 2 will be ranked higher than an Importance of 1. The user can define importance through a fixed value, a data source or a function (Time of Evaluation for a function must be set to ‘Environmental Flow Prioritisation’).


The valid range of values for Importance are positive numbers however importance may be set as zero or negative. If a group has only one action which has an importance of zero or negative, the action will not be enabled. If actions within a group have different Importance values, the highest importance will be used for the group. A group would only be disabled, if all actions would have Importance zero or negative.


Portfolios

Available Portfolios:

The user can add one (or more) portfolio(s) from which the action can be delivered.
Priority: Set the priority for portfolio use (for accounting this specific group of actions). If a group can make use of multiple portfolios, the user can specify which portfolio will be debited first. A portfolio with priority 1 will be used before the portfolio with priority 2.
Share: If multiple portfolios have the same priority, the Share indicates what percentage of the volume to be accounted will come from which portfolio.