RiverWare Applications at Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

Abstract

For the past several years, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), U. S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), and the University of Colorado's Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES) have partnered to develop a software package called RiverWare for use in modeling multipurpose reservoir systems. RiverWare now offers three different modeling approaches: interactive simulation, rulebased simulation, and optimization. The flexibility of RiverWare makes it a modeling tool that can be used in many applications to support reservoir operations. While interactive simulation and optimization are used by TVA in daily operation of the reservoir system, rulebased simulation is currently being applied as a tool in flood risk studies, and is being considered for use in long-term reservoir policy evaluations. The capability to model the same system in varying timesteps and model run lengths, along with the selection of three modeling approaches with a consistent user interface, makes it very useful for both planning and daily operation of the TVA reservoir system. This paper will discuss the RiverWare applications used by forecasters in TVA's River System Operations. To begin, interactive simulation as it is used in daily operation of the reservoir system along with a RiverWare tool that allows convenient user interaction will be covered. The application of the optimization feature of RiverWare and how this is used in scheduling the TVA hydro system will then be discussed, followed by a description of rulebased simulation and how it is being applied in flood risk studies. Finally, the RiverWare data management utility used by TVA and the hardware used to run RiverWare at TVA will be discussed.